THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

RIVERSIDE 


Essays  at  Large 


Works  by  J.    C.   Squire 
POEMS 

POEMS  :  FIRST  SERIES  SccoTid  Edition 

A  Collection  of  Poems  written  1905-1918 

POEMS   :    SECOND    SERIES 

A  Collection  of  Poems  written  1918-1921 

THE  BIRDS  AND  OTHER  POEMS  Second  Thousand 

Poems  written  1918-1919 

THE    SURVIVAL    OF    THE    FITTEST  FoUVth    Edition 

THE     MOON 

Also  in  a  Limited  Autographed  Edition  on  large 
paper 

ESSAYS 

THE    GOLD    TREE    AND    OTHER    STUDIES 

Limited  Autographed  Edition 
LIFE    AND    LETTERS 
BOOKS    IN    GENERAL  :     FIRST    SERIES  Thivd   Edition 

By  Solomon  Eagle 

BOOKS    IN    GENERAL  :    SECOND    SERIES 
BOOKS    IN    GENERAL  ',    THIRD    SERIES 

PARODIES 

COLLECTED  PARODIES  Sccond  Edition 

IMAGINARY    SPEECHES 
STEPS    TO    PARNASSUS 

TRICKS  OF  THE  TRADE  Seventh  Edition 


THE    COLLECTED     POEMS    OF    JAMES     ELROY    FLECKER  : 

Edited,  with  an  Introduction 

SELECTIONS     FROM     MODERN     POETS 

The  abo'\>e  are  all  published  by  Hodder  and  Stoughton 
with  the  exception  oj  ''Flecker' s  Poems^''  and'' Selec- 
tions from  Modern  Toets  "  {Seeder),  and  "  Steps  to 
Parnassus,''  "  Imaginary  Speeches,"  and  "The  Sur- 
vival of  the  Fittest"  {Allen  and  Unwin) 


Essays  at  Large 

By  Solomon   Eagle   >*^ 


NEW    >tajr     YORK 
GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 

{Printed  in  Gnat  Britain.\ 


QeS£7f 


The  Westminster  Press 

411a  Harrow  Road 

London  W  9 


TO 

James  Murray  Allison 


PREFATORY  NOTE 

MOST  of  these  papers  are  reprinted  from 
the  Outlook ;  a  few,  which  seemed  akin  to 
the  others,  appeared  in  Land  and  Water, 
which  died  under  the  burden. 

S.  E. 
1922. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Reading  in  Bed  i 

Life  at  the  Mermaid  6 

The  New  Style  of  Memoir  12 

Pronunciation  18 

By  Lewis  Carroll  24 

Press  Cuttings  30 

On  Knowing  Authors  35 

A  Return  40 

The  King  of  Prussia  46 

John  Pom  fret  51 

Candid  Biography  56 

Rejected  Contributions  63 

An  Indian  Bard  68 

A  Trick  of  Memory  74 

Prize  Poems  7^ 

Burton's  Anatomy  83 

A  Veterinary  Surgeon  88 

The  Lonely  Author  93 

Critics  in  1820  97 

An  Old  Calendar  103 

The  Seaman's  Progress  108 

jCiS.ioo  "3 

Dickens's  Friends  119 

Poetry  and  Commonplace  125 

Shakespeare  and  the  Second  Chamber  130 

On  Being  a  Jonah  135 

Valour  and  Vision  141 

Real  People  in  Books  147 

Railroadiana  152 

On  Being  Somebody  Else  158 

xi 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

A  Commonplace  Book 

163 

Surnames 

168 

A  Translator  of  Genius 

174 

Authors'  Relics 

180 

The  Librarian's  Hard  Lot 

185 

Disraeh's  Wit 

191 

An  Edifying  Classic 

196 

Christmas  Cards 

201 

Quotations 

207 

■xu 


READING  IN  BED 

DISCUSSION  amongst  human  beings  is 
very  difficult.  There  were  three  of  us,  and 
we  talked  about  reading  in  bed.  At  the  end 
of  a  quarter  of  an  hour  it  dawned  on  us — we  had 
had  faint  glimmerings  of  this  before — that  we  had 
been  talking  about  different  things. 

"  What  is  the  best  thing  to  read  in  bed  ?  "  It 
sounds  a  sufficiently  concrete  item  in  the  agenda. 
But  we  had  overlooked  the  fact  that  men  might  read 
in  bed  with  different  motives.  "  If  you  were  staying 
in  a  country  house  for  the  night,  and  found  one  of 
those  little  sliding  bookcases  on  the  table  beside 
your  bed,  what  would  you  like  to  find  in  it  ?  "  That 
also  looked  definite  enough.  But  neither  was  really 
sufficiently  precise.  No  allowance  was  made  for 
temperament. 

Of  course,  we  all  know  what  we  should  find  in  it. 
Granted  a  cultivated  household,  where  the  furniture 
was  good,  the  walls  tastefully  hung,  and  the  host 
and  hostess  an  fait  with  modern  literature  and  the 
latest  poHtical  thought,  very  little  latitude  is  con- 
ceivable. Either  the  small  bookcase  would  contain 
two  volumes  of  Mr.  Shaw's  plays,  a  volume  of  Mr. 
Granville  Barker's,  some  Tchekov  short  stories,  a 
book  of  sketches  by  Mr.  Galsworthy,  and  a  faded 
Ibsen  volume  published  by  the  firm  of  Walter  Scott; 
or  else  it  would  contain  Mr.  Chesterton's  *'  The 
Defendant  "  and  "  A  Miscellany  of  Men,"  Mr. 
Belloc's  '•  On  An>^hing  "  and  "  Hills  and  the  Sea," 
a  volume  of  essays  by  Mr.  Lucas,  and  "  Idlehurst." 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

Stay  !  there  is  a  third  possibiHty  :  Wordsworth, 
"  Rab  and  His  Friends,"  the  "  VaiUma  Letters  " 
and  the  "  Essays  of  Elia,"  with  Matthew  Arnold's 
"  Essays  in  Criticism,"  and  something  of  Waher 
Bagehot's.  These  are  what  one  would,  and  does 
repeatedly,  find.  The  question  is  :  What  would  one 
wish  to  find,  and  why  ? 

I  gather  that  there  are  three  objects  in  reading  in 
bed.  Some  men  pursue  only  one,  some  pursue  each 
in  turn,  some  have  two  or  more  in  mind  as  alter- 
natives at  any  particular  moment.  Firstly,  you  may 
read  in  bed  in  order  to  send  yourself  to  sleep  at  the 
earliest  possible  moment.  Well,  there  are  occasions 
when  one  feels  like  that.  I  myself  have  for  many 
years  kept  beside  my  pallet  Kant's  "  Critique  of 
Pure  Reason."  I  have  never  got  through  it.  I  always 
begin  again  at  the  same  place,  to  wit,  the  first  line. 
The  result  is  that  I  probably  know  the  first  three 
pages  as  well  as  any  man  alive,  and  that  I  am  totally 
ignorant  as  to  what  comes  after.  I  may  say  in  self- 
defence  that  I  am  not  in  the  least  degree  curious 
about  what  comes  after  ;  but  there  it  is.  That  is 
the  first  mode,  and  that  the  first  object  of  reading  in 
bed.  Next  there  is  the  moderate  course  and  the 
sensible  object  of  the  man  who  Hkes  to  read  a  little 
in  bed,  but  does  not  w^ant  to  be  deprived  of  what 
grandmother  would  have  called  his  beauty  sleep. 
The  book  must  not  be  boring  ;  it  must  not  be  too 
exciting.  It  must  be  interesting  on  every  page  but 
dramatic  nowhere  ;  there  must  be  a  stream  of  event 
but  no  definite  break.  Well,  I  do  not  really  think 
that  those  volumes  of  essays  quite  suit  the  case.  The 
end  of  an  essay  usually  comes  just  before  that  fatal, 


READING  IN  BED 

final  blink,  and  one  wants  to  begin  another.  What 
one  needs  is  the  book  that  can  be  begun  anywhere 
and  dropped  anywhere  ;  and  I  can  conceive  no 
books  better  in  that  regard  than  Boswell,  Gibbon, 
Hakluyt,  and  Lucas's  "  Life  of  Lamb."  These  are 
so  long  and  so  uniform  that  there  is  no  hope  of  finish- 
ing them  in  a  night,  and  no  fear  of  worrying  about  a 
climax  not  reached  ;  and  they  are  so  good  that  one 
never  minds  if  one  does  read  the  same  pages  over 
and  over  again.  I  found,  in  our  discussion,  that  each 
of  these  species  of  nocturnal  reading  was  favoured 
by  one  of  my  friends.  But  for  myself  I  shamelessly 
confessed  that,  however  tired  I  might  be,  I  should 
always,  even  were  the  whole  contents  of  the  British 
Museum  at  call  from  my  bed,  ask  for  a  shocker. 
Give  me  "  Bulldog  Drummond,"  "  Station  X,"  or 
"  Trent's  Last  Case  "  and  I  will  read  in  bed  until 
dawn.  Let  sleep  go.  Let  the  morrow's  duties  go. 
Let  health,  prudence,  and  honour  go.  The  bedside 
book  for  me  is  the  book  that  will  longest  keep  me 
awake. 

It  is  a  large  subject,  and  one  seldom  discussed. 
Hundreds  of  thousands,  possibly  millions,  of  people 
every  night  in  England  read  something  in  bed.  They 
say  nothing  about  it  except  "  I  read  for  a  Uttle  last 
night  and  then  slept  like  a  top,"  or  "  I  didn't  feel 
like  going  to  sleep  last  night,  so  I  read  for  a  bit,"  or 
"  I  began  reading  so-and-so  in  bed  last  night,  and 
damn  the  book,  I  couldn't  get  to  sleep  until  I 
finished  it."  Usually  nothing  at  all  is  said  ;  if  any- 
thing is  said  it  is  very  little.  Yet  what  a  large  slice 
of  each  of  our  lives  has  gone  in  this  harmless  occu- 
pation. ^^'e  get  our  clothes  off.  We  get  our  pyjamas 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

on.  We  wind  our  watches.  We  arrange  the  table  and 
the  light  and  get  into  bed.  We  pile  up,  or  double 
up,  the  pillows.  Then  we  settle  down  to  it.  Some- 
times the  book  is  so  exciting  that  all  thought  of  sleep 
fades  away,  and  we  read  on  oblivious  of  everything 
except  the  unseen  menace  in  that  dark  house,  the 
boat  ghding  stealthily  along  that  misty  river,  the 
Chinaman's  eyes  peering  through  that  greenish- 
yellow  fog,  or  the  sudden  crack  of  the  revolver  in 
that  den  of  infamy.  Sometimes  we  read  for  a  while 
and  then  feel  as  though  we  could  go  peacefully  to 
sleep.  Sometimes  we  struggle  desperately  to  gum 
our  failing  attention  to  the  acute  analysis  and  safe 
deductions  of  our  author.  Our  eyes  squint  and  swim. 
Our  head  dizzies.  We  feel  drunk,  and,  dropping 
the  book  aside  from  lax  hands,  just  manage  to  get 
the  light  out  before  falling  back  into  a  dense  and 
miry  slumber.  We  all  know  those  fights  against  in- 
evitable sleep,  those  resolves  to  reach  the  inaccessible 
end  of  the  chapter,  those  sw'immings  in  the  head, 
those  relapses  into  the  gulf  of  slumber.  And  we  all 
know^  those  long  readings  when  the  mystery  and 
suspense  of  the  text  so  excite  us  that  every  creak  of 
the  stair  and  every  fluttering  of  the  pertinacious 
moths  makes  the  heart  stand  still,  and  then  keeps 
it  beating  hard  for  minutes.  We  have  all  turned 
the  light  out  just  in  time  ;  and  we  have  all  turned 
it  out  from  boredom,  or  in  an  access  of  determined 
common-sense,  and  then  turned  it  on  again  to  re- 
sume the  dreary  reading  where  we  left  the  piece  of 
paper  or  the  pencil  in  the  page.  But  we  seldom  talk 
about  it.  It  is  a  part  of  our  really  private  hves,  which 
include  also  our  operations  in  the  bath-room,  and 


READING  IN  BED 

our  contrivances  for  keeping,  at  certain  moments, 
our  clotlies  together.  These  are  universal  experiences 
which  each  man  thinks  peculiar  to  himself,  yet 
which  hardly  anybody  ever  thinks  worth  mentioning. 


LIFE  AT  THE  MERMAID 

AT  breakfast,  with  an  author  more  venerable, 
I  opened  a  bookseller's  catalogue  which  had 
just  reached  me  from  America.  It  contained 
many  interesting  things  :  manuscripts  of  Spaniards 
of  whom  I  had  never  heard,  early  editions  of  old 
English  writers  of  whom  I  had  barely  heard,  desir- 
able editions  of  the  classics,  this,  that,  and  the  other, 
and  some  first  editions  of  illustrious  contemporaries. 
I  knew — I  usually  know  as  much — that  I  should 
not  bother  to  write  for  anything  from  that  catalogue, 
and  could  not  pay  for  it  if  I  did  ;  nevertheless  I  pro- 
ceeded like  a  caterpillar  through  the  items.  As  I 
turned  the  tenth  page  I  had  a  slight  shock — it  wasn't 
really  surprising — at  seeing  six  times  repeated  the 
name  of  my  companion.  He  is  a  man  of  genius,  and 
it  is  all  quite  fit  and  proper  that  the  collectors  of 
America  should  give,  or  at  least  be  asked  to  give, 
considerable  sums  of  money  for  the  first  editions  of 
his  books.  "  Hallo,"  I  said,  "  they  seem  to  be  pay- 
ing through  the  nose  now  for  your  first  editions." 
"  Ah  .?  "  he  said.  "  Of  course,"  I  went  on— and  I 
was  merely  stating  a  fact — "  the  prices  are  nothing 
like  so  big  as  our  grandchildren  will  pay."  His 
answer  was  "  Bigger  - — -  fools  they  !  " 

There  suddenly  flashed  on  me  a  vision  of  those 
grandchildren — a  vision,  be  it  admitted,  based  on 
the  assumption  that  our  civilisation  will  endure, 
which  is  not  certain.  I  saw  a  spacious  room  with 
glazed  bookcases,  and  a  young  bibhophile  showing 
another  his  rare  editions  and  tooled  bindings.  They 

6 


LIFE  AT  THE  MERMAID 

fingered  one  after  another,  and  at  last  they  came  to 
the  first  scarce  work  of  my  friend.  I  heard  the  con- 
versation. "  What  did  you  give  for  that  ?"  "Eighty- 
five  pounds."  "  It's  nice  to  have  it  with  his  signature 
in,  knowing  that  he  handled  it.  If  he  knew  he  might 
be  consoled  for  the  way  people  underrated  him  when 
he  was  alive."  Probably  there  will  be  such  conver- 
sations. There  may  be  a  Life  of  my  friend  ;  the 
Life  may  include  some  of  his  intimate  correspond- 
ence and  alleged  specimens  of  his  "  table-talk." 
They  will  have  a  pretty  good  idea  of  his  character 
and  his  genius,  they  will  know  his  pedigree,  the  state 
of  his  finances,  his  goings  to  and  fro  on  the  earth. 
But  with  their  inadequate  information  and  their 
incorrigible  romanticism  they  will  have  no  notion 
as  to  what  his  real  daily  talk  was  like,  as  distin- 
guished from  his  more  intense  conversation.  Do 
we  really  know  any  dead  man  in  his  daily  life  ?  Dr. 
Johnson,  some  would  say.  We  know  his  voice  and 
his  habits  of  mind  better  than  most  people's  ;  yef 
even  Boswell  did  not  take  down  anything  unless  it 
seemed  to  be  a  little  above  the  ordinary  level,  to  have 
some  special  point  or  value.  A  gramophone  record 
of  Dr.  Johnson's  words  through  a  whole  day  would 
supply  us  with  something  quite  new.  It  would  also 
diminish  a  Httle  Dr.  Johnson's  apparent  stature. 
We  see  the  great  dead  as  larger  than  human  because 
we  have  of  them,  however  much  we  have,  only  a 
refined  essence.  When  we  do  really  meet  an  ordinary 
fact — such  as  the  fact  that  Mary  Shelley  irri- 
tated Percy  (in  the  throes  of  composition)  by 
asking  him  to  fetch  her  cotton-reel  from  the  corner 
where  it   had  rolled — it  stands   out  as  something 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

very  illuminating.  Meditating  thus  I  attended  a 
literary  dinner,  a  regular  dinner,  one  of  a  series  that 
might  conceivably  be  mentioned  (for  the  oddest 
things  turn  up)  in  future  literary  memoirs  and  then 
in  the  histories.  Good  things  were  said,  interesting 
books  were  discussed  :  but  not  all  the  time,  no,  not 
all  the  time.  And  I  wondered  what  the  meetings  of 
the  Romantics  were  actually  like,  and  what  those 
evenings  at  the  Mermaid  Tavern.  We  know  there 
were  great  times  at  the  Mermaid,  and  one  in  fond 
reminiscence  said  that  the  frequenters  would  put 
their  whole  souls  in  a  jest.  Nevertheless  other  things 
were  said,  and  I  conceive  that  there  were  tracts  of 
conversation  like  this  : 

Shakespeare  :   I  don't  think  much  of  this  fish. 

Ben  Jonson  :  The  fish  has  been  filthy  the  last 
three  times. 

Shakespeare  :  It's  always  Uke  that  at  these 
places.  They  do  you  very  well  to  start  with,  and 
when  they  think  they've  got  you  fixed  it  goes  off. 

Drayton  :  The  waiters  are  getting  pretty 
uncivil,  too.  Especially  that  ugly  brute  with  the 
squint.  I  distrust  that  man. 

Ben  Jonson  :  I'm  sick  of  the  place.  It's  no 
better  than  the  Sun  was. 

Shakespeare  :  But  is  there  anywhere  else  that 
we  could  try  ?  Is  it  not  better  to  endure  the  ills 
we  have  than  fly  to  others  that  we  know  not  of  ? 

Ben  Jonson  :  You  might  leave  it  to  somebody 
else  to  quote  your  works. 

Shakespeare  :  I  don't  think  the  company  has 
any  right  to  complain  so  long  as  I  don't  quote 
yours. 

8 


LIFE  AT  THE  MERMAID 

Chapman  :  Oh,  shut  up,  you  two,  you're  always 
at  it  ! 

Beaumont  :  We  never  seem  to  be  able  to  discuss 
anything  properly  here.  The  point  is,  can  we  get  a 
better  dinner  anywhere  else,  and,  if  so,  where  ? 

Fletcher  :    At  the  same  price,  Francis  ? 

Beaumont  :  Of  course.  Jack,  that  goes  without 
saying. 

Chapman  :  Why  shouldn't  we  go  to  the  Devil  ? 

Shakespeare  :  Speak  for  yourself. 

Ben  Jonson  :  It's  a  pity  you  can't  remember 
to  keep  your  weaker  witticisms  for  the  theatre, 
where  they  seem  to  like  them. 

Chapman  :  The  Devil  really  is  rather  a  good 
place.  Mrs.  Jones  is  a  nice  old  woman,  and  her 
cellar  is  extraordinarily  good. 

Shakespeare  :  It  may  be,  but  all  I  can  say  is 
that  the  last  pint  of  sack  I  drank  there  nearly 
poisoned  me.  It  seems  to  me  that  we'd  better 
stick  where  we  are.  But  it's  a  rotten  place. 

All  :  Yes,  rotten  1 

Shakespeare  :  When's  your  new  play  coming 
on,  Ben  ? 

Ben  Jonson  :  Oh,  he  says  he  thinks  he'll  get 
it  on  next  week  !  It's  a  lie,  of  course.  These  man- 
agers make  me  sick.  If  he  doesn't  hurry  up  I  shall 
publish  it  first. 

Shakespeare  :   Oh,  I  shouldn't  do  that  ! 

Ben  Jonson  :  Oh,  we  know  you  wouldn't  ! 
You'd  never  publish  it  at  all.  You'd  leave  it  to 
some  swindUng  printer  to  get  it  out,  full  of  mis- 
prints. Personally  I  happen  to  be  interested  in 
what  I  write. 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

Chapman  :  Oh,  for  God's  sake  stop  quarrel- 
ling !  You  make  the  place  a  bear-garden.  What's 
the  news  about  Spain  ? 

Donne  :  Nothing  doing.  I  saw  the  Lord 
Chamberlain  yesterday  and  he  said  he'd  just  seen 
old  Gondomar,  and  he  seemed  very  amiable. 
There's  some  talk  of  the  Prince  of  Wales  marry- 
ing an  Infanta. 

Shakespeare  :  It's  enough  to  make  poor  old 
Drake  turn  in  his  grave. 

Ben  Jonson  :    Oh,  you're  a  sentimentalist  ! 

Shakespeare  :  Chuck  it  about  ;  I  don't  mind. 
All  I  know  is  that  the  more  I  sec  of  politics  the 
less  I  like  them. 

Drayton  :   Nice  boy,  the  Prince  of  Wales. 

Beaumont  (vvhispering  loudly  to  Fletcher)  : 
No  wonder  Drayton  thinks  so,  considering  that 
the  kid  has  just  given  him  fifty  quid  to  help  pub- 
lish his  rotten  epic. 

Drayton  :  I  heard  what  you  said.  It's  not 
true.  It's  all  that  Browne's  doing.  He's  always 
putting  these  absurd  stories  about. 

Shakespeare  :  Don't  take  it  to  heart,  Mike  ; 
they're  only  pulling  your  leg. 

Ben  Jonson  :  Faugh  !  Mutton  again.  I  don't 
believe  they've  given  us  anything  but  mutton  for 
eighteen  months. 

Shakespeare  :   Mutton  is  so  sheep,  you  see. 

{Loud  howls.) 

Chapman  (to  Drayton)  :  How  many  lines  is 
your  epic  .'* 

Drayton  :  I  can't  tell  yet,  the  second  part 
isn't  finished.  I  should  think  it  might  run  to  ten 
thousand.  jq 


LIFE  AT  THE  MERMAID 

Chapman  :  My  Homer  is  more  than  that,  I 
should  think. 

Shakespeare  :  Such  long  lines  too.  If  you  were 
being  paid  by  the  line  I  should  advise  your  split- 
ting them  in  halves. 

Fletcher  :   Do  you  know  Mary  FittonJ? 

Donne  :  No  ;  I  think  Shakespeare  does^;  I've 
heard  rather  odd  things  about  her.  Don't  you 
know  Miss  Fitton,  William  ? 

Shakespeare  :  No  ;  I've  just  met  her.  She 
seemed  to  be  rather  an  ass  ;  clever,  of  course, 
but  boring.  She  will  insist  on  talking  about  books 
all  the  time.  I  met  her  at  the  Bacons'. 

Fletcher  (to  Beaumont)  :  I  don't  suppose 
there's  anything  in  it.  This  town  is  a  fearful  place 
for  gossip. 

Shakespeare  :  I  say,  you  people,  I'm  awfully 
sorry  to  break  up  the  party,  but  I've  got  to  get 
back  to  Stratford  by  next  F^riday  and  a  man  has 
offered  me  a  lift.  I  simply  must  get  there. 

{Rises  to  go.) 

Donne  :  What's  the  hurry  ?  Don't  tell  us  you 
ever  do  anything  at  Stratford. 

Shakespeare  :  Oh,  it's  a  deal  with  a  man  about 
wool  !  I  don't  see  why  one  shouldn't  turn  an 
honest  penny  when  one  gets  the  chance. 

Beaumont  :   Well,  just  one  more,  William. 

Shakespeare  :  All  right,  just  one  more,  but  it 
will  have  to  be  a  quick  one.  .  .  . 

I  have  telescoped  history  a  little,  and  I  have  been  at 
no  pains  to  achieve  an  archaistic  realism  by  sprinkling 
the  dialogue  with  marrys,  gulls,  wittols,  and  argosies. 
But  I  daresay  that  is  what  the  Mermaid  was  like, 

II 


THE;NEW  STYLE  OF  MEMOIR 

IT  is  about  time  somebody  made  a  heavy  pro- 
test against  the  latest  form  of  memoir — the 
contemporary  memoir  in  which  the  author  takes 
advantage  of  opportunities  which  have  been  given 
to  him  as  a  private  person,  pillories  those  who  have 
innocently  admitted  him  to  their  homes,  repeats 
strictly  private  conversations,  or  describes  purely 
private  assembUes  out  of  which  he  would  have  been 
promptly  booted  if  anybody  present  had  known 
what  he  was  up  to.  There  have  been  four  or  five  of 
these  in  the  last  few  years.  We  all  read  them  (we 
can't  help  it),  and  they  are  commercially  profitable. 
Nothing  but  a  dead  set  against  offending  authors 
will  stop  their  increase. 

Now  I  need  scarcely  say  that  I  am  not  arguing 
against  the  recording  of  any  and  every  event,  literary 
or  political,  hkely  to  be  of  historical  interest  :  of  any 
dinner  party,  conversation,  secret  intrigue,  odd, 
strange,  significant,  or  diverting  word  or  deed  of 
any  species  whatever.  We  can  say  what  we  like  about 
the  dead.  Doubtless  De  mortuis  nil  nisi  honum  has  an 
element  of  truth  in  it  :  we  should  be  especially 
careful  about  calumniating  a  person  who  is  no  longer 
able  to  defend  himself.  But  even  here  one  remembers 
that  calumny  against  a  living  person  may  not  merely 
damage  his  reputation  but  ruin  his  hfe,  so  that  if 
you  are  to  be  maligned  there  is  (in  the  words  of  the 
poet) 

A  good  deal  to  be  said 
For  being  dead. 

12 


THE  NEW  STYLE  OF  MEMOIR 

The  thoughtless  persons  who  quote  De  jnortuis  do 
not  seem  to  reahse  that  if  their  precious  maxim  were 
Hterally  acted  upon  all  history,  and  all  biography, 
would  be  abolished  at  one  swoop.  No  man  could 
really  be  expected  to  hoax  himself  into  thinking  it 
amusing,  or  serviceable,  to  write  history  on  these 
lines  : 

So  Henry  VIII  died,  as  he  had  Uved,  in  the 
odour  of  sanctity,  beloved  by  his  wife  (Catherine 
of  Aragon)  who  was  his  first  and  only  romance, 
and  revered  by  his  people.  His  spare  features  and 
sympathetic  deep-sunken  eyes,  so  vividly  pre- 
served for  us  on  the  canvases  of  Holbein,  attest 
the  unworldly  character  of  the  man  and  the  aus- 
terity of  his  life.  No  unfortunate  incident  marred 
the  perfect  serenity  of  his  reign,  save  one  only, 
the  execution  of  Sir  T.  More,  owing  to  a  mis- 
understanding on  the  part  of  an  official  who  never 
recovered  from  his  remorse,  though  no  blame 
could  possibly  attach  to  him.  The  King  was  out 
of  town  and  heard  notliing  until  too  late.  He  wore 
mourning  for  the  rest  of  his  life,  .  .  . 

If  there  was  one  thing  Charles  II  detested  more 
than  marital  infidelity,  it  was  easy  cynicism  but 
no — all  his  contemporaries  are  dead,  so  there 
cannot  possibly  have  been  any  infidelity  or  cyni- 
cism for  him  to  detest],  and  the  industry  with 
which  he  served  the  commonwealth  has  never 
been  surpassed  by  an  EngHsh  monarch,  though 
every  EngUsh  monarch  has  equalled  it.  One  of 
his  noble  actions  was  his  refusal,  when  short  of 
cash,  owing  to  his  large  benefactions,  of  a  gift  of 

13 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

money  from  Louis  XIV  on  the  ground  that  it 
might  appear  to  put  him  under  an  improper 
obHgation.  That,  of  course,  was  far  from  being 
in  the  mind  of  the  French  King,  and  it  is  difficult 
to  say  upon  which  Sovereign  the  incident  reflects 
most  credit.  .  .  . 

Napoleon,  Emperor  of  the  French,  a  man  dis- 
tinguished for  the  sacredness  which  he  attached 
to  human  Hfe  and  the  impHcit  trust  he  put  in 
human  nature,  died  at  St.  Helena  in  1821.  He 
had  abdicated  in  181 5  owing  to  faiUng  health, 
and  chose  that  sunny  island  on  the  advice  of  his 
doctors,  finding  a  great  solace  during  his  last 
years  in  the  congenial  conversation  of  an  English- 
man, Sir  Hudson  Lowe,  who  exiled  himself  in 
order  to  be  near  his  invahd  friend.  His  name,  as 
a  benefactor  of  mankind,  stands  in  the  company 
of  those  of  Elizabeth  Fry,  Frederick  the  Great, 
St.  Francis  of  Assisi,  Lord  Rockingham,  and 
Nero.  .  .  . 

An  interesting  figure  of  the  time  was  Charles 
Peace,  a  quaint  and  lovable  Yorkshireman,  with 
a  great  love  of  adventure,  and  a  delightful  talent 
as  a  violinist.  He  was  born  in  Yorkshire,  but  Uved 
latterly  in  South  London,  though  he  died  away 
from  home. 

That  is  the  reductio  ad  absurdum  of  that  over-driven 
and  foolish  proverb.  We  want  about  the  dead  the 
truth,  and  if  our  age  has  no  Pepys,  no  Horace  Wal- 
pole,  no  Charles  Greville,  posterity  will  be  deprived 
of  both  the  edification  and  the  amusement  to  which 
it  is  entitled.  Let  people  record  as  much  as  they  can 

14 


THE  NEW  STYLE  OF  MEMOIR 

of  those  who  are  Hkely  to  be  interesting  to  our 
descendants.  But  let  them  keep  it  for  our  descend- 
ants :  or  at  least  let  them  give  their  records  time  to 
get  too  stale  to  embarrass  the  persons  they  are 
writing  about. 

I  don't  suppose,  that  is  to  say,  that  Lord  Morley 
would  much  care  if  anybody  now  published  his 
dinner-table,  or  more  intimate,  conversation  at  the 
time  of  the  First  Home  Rule  Bill,  although  he  is 
still  alive.  But  if  people  are  to  repeat  private  con- 
versations they  had  last  year — there  may  be  ex- 
ceptional occasions  when  urgent  considerations  of 
public  interest  make  such  a  thing,  after  solemn 
reflection,  seem  right — private  life  becomes  im- 
possible. It  is  only  a  stage  from  printing  reports  of 
private  discussions  three  or  four  years  ago  to  treat- 
ing private  conversations  as  news.  Unless  some 
action  is  taken  against  gross  ofi"enders,  it  will  not  be 
long  before  some  more  reckless  and  enterprising 
successor  of  Colonel  Repington's  goes  to  a  dinner 
one  night  and  has  in  the  papers  next  morning  a 
description  of  what  everybody  present  said  and  did. 
You  cannot  elaborately  swear  everybody  present  to 
secrecy  before  you  sit  down  ;  yet  you  never  know 
who  is  going  on  the  loose  as  a  diarist  next.  Yet  how 
can  one  keep  a  rein  upon  one's  tongue,  or  how  would 
anything  ever  get  done  if  everybody  were  mute  as  a 
fish  on  every  subject  except  the  weather  ?  Civilisation 
is  only  held  together  by  an  honourable  respect  for 
private  life,  by  pledges  unspoken,  but  neverthe- 
less implicit.  There  are  thousands  of  people  in 
London  who,  if  they  cared  to  print  their  recent 
recollections  or  their  diaries,  could  make  sensations 

15 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

and  large  sums  of  money.  Even  my  ears,  which  have 
not  listened  to  the  whisperings  of  the  Great  with  a 
hundredth  part  of  Colonel  Repington's  assiduity, 
have  received  impressions  which,  if  I  were  to  trans- 
mit them  to  paper,  would  be  quoted  in  every  news- 
paper, titillate  a  large  pubhc,  cause  distress  in 
many  homes,  and  give  trouble  to  a  fair  number  of 
important  people.  Are  we  coming  to  a  time  when  I 
shall  be  considered  rather  a  brisk  fellow  if  I  sud- 
denly launch  them  all  upon  a  printer  ? 

It  isn't  only  that  things  may  be  divulged  which 
will  cause  serious  trouble,  though  in  recent  diaries 
there  have  been  these,  but  that  people  object  to 
having  their  private  lives  and  characters,  however 
flatteringly,  discussed  in  print  at  all.  It  is  irritating 
to  find  one's  friends  saying  in  print  that  one  is  fond 
of  one's  children  or  that  one  gave  a  luncheon  at 
which  the  food  was  very  good.  People  don't  like  it. 
It  isn't  vanity,  nor  is  it  modesty,  that  makes  them 
shrink  from  the  modern  sort  of  publicity  :  it  is 
merely  the  common  human  desire  for  a  measure  of 
privacy  and  the  common  human  feeling  that  there 
is  an  honourable  obligation  to  respect  that  privacy 
if  you  are  admitted  into  it.  All  else  apart,  even  when 
harmless  truths  are  told,  they  are  often  so  told  as  to 
give  false  impressions.  For  myself  I  am  not  suffi- 
ciently, I  am  happy  to  say,  of  public  interest  to  make 
it  worth  anybody's  while  to  publish  the  fact  that 
he  came  to  lunch  at  my  house  on  Sunday,  that  So- 
and-So  and  So-and-So  were  there,  and  that  we  said 
this  and  that  about  the  French,  Mr.  Wells,  the 
Russians,  and  President  Wilson.  But  if  anybody 
were  to  do  that  he  would  get  a  pretty  hot  reception 

i6 


THE  NEW  STYLE  OF  MEMOIR 

next  time  he  attempted  to  speak  to  me.  And  I  cannot 
understand  how  those  who  have  been  molested  can 
behave  otherwise  to  persons  who  have  thus  annoyed 
them. 


*7 


PRONUNCIATION 

THE  conversationalist  in  this  country  has  a 
thorny  road  to  tread .  A  correspondent  writes , 
poor  thing,  to  ask  me,  in  confidence,  how 
he  should  pronounce  "  Quixote,"  a  word  he  finds 
frequently  cropping  up  in  his  talk.  His  natural  in- 
chnation  and  early  practice  was  to  speak  of  Don 
Quixote  as  though  the  cavalier  had  an  English  "  x  " 
in  his  name.  Of  late  years  he  has  found,  when  in 
circles  where  people  really  do  know  things,  a  growing 
tendency  to  pronounce  the  name  in  the  Spanish 
way — which  we  may  represent,  though  inadequately, 
by  the  spelling  Keehotte.  Now,  my  correspondent, 
being  a  sailor,  is  a  shy  and  sensitive  man.  He  feels 
sheepish.  He  does  not  want  to  drop  "  Don  Quixote  " 
out  of  his  life  altogether,  as  it  is  one  of  his  favourite 
books,  and  he  even  has  theories  about  it.  But  he  is 
afraid.  If  he  says  "  Quix  "  in  the  coarse  English 
manner  he  fears  that  the  experienced  and  super- 
cilious landsman  may  stare  at  him  as  at  an  illiterate 
boor  ;  but  he  shrinks  from  tackling  the  other  pro- 
nunciation, partly  because  he  knows  he  couldn't 
do  it  without  looking  self-conscious,  partly  because 
he  does  not  wish  to  affect  an  acquaintance  w^ith 
Spanish  which  he  does  not  possess,  and  partly  be- 
cause he  is  sure  he  would  never  get  it  right.  He  might 
even  be  so  far  from  right  that  somebody,  not  under- 
standing or  pretending  not  to  understand,  niight 
make  him  repeat  the  outlandish  syllables,  a  process 
which  would  cause  him  to  blush  all  down  his  back. 
What,  he  asks,  should  he  do  ? 


PRONUNCIATION 

Say  "  Quix  "  and  make  no  bones  about  it.  It  is 
an  easier  instance  than  most  of  its  kind.  "  Quixote  " 
has  had  an  English  pronunciation  for  years,  a  pro- 
nunciation as  estabUshed  as  our  pronunciation  of 
"  Paris,"  which  no  EngUshman  talking  to  another 
Englishman  would  dream  of  calling  Puree.  Not  only 
this,  but  it  has  generated  an  English  adjective.  I 
doubt  if  the  most  pedantic  or  the  most  priggish  of 
men  says  "  Keehottic  "  for  "  Quixotic  "  ;  yet  it  is 
grotesque  to  pronounce  the  one  word  in  the  English 
way  whilst  perspiring  to  restore  an  alien  pronunci- 
ation to  the  other.  But  the  case  would  be  quite 
strong  enough  without  that.  There  is  no  point  what- 
ever in  forcing  a  foreign  pronunciation  (unless  we 
are  talking  to  foreigners)  of  some  names  unless  we 
do  the  same  for  all.  To  go  no  further  from  Don 
Quixote  than  its  author,  there  is  Cervantes.  He  was 
a  great  man,  and  there  are  many  interesting  things 
about  him.  We  know  that — 

The  Spaniards  think  Cervantes 
Worth  half-a-dozen  Dantes, 
An  opinion  resented  bitterly 
By  the  people  of  Italy. 

He  wrote  one  of  the  narrative  masterpieces  of  the 
world,  and  thought  it  much  inferior  to  his  other 
works,  which  nobody  can  now  read.  But  the  point 
about  him  in  our  present  connection  is  that  his  "  C  " 
is  not  pronounced  by  the  Spaniards  as  an  English 
"  C,"  but  rather  (I  hope  I  am  correct — I  do  not 
know  any  Spanish)  as  a  "  th  "  ;  and  when  the 
Spaniards  don't  sound  "  c  "  as  "  th  "  they  sound  it 

19 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

as  "  k,"  Yet  the  prig  has  still  to  begin  operations  who 
will  call  him  (otherwise  than  because  of  some  de- 
fect of  utterance)  Thervantes  at  an  English  dinner- 
table.  Some  words  have  always  had  a  specially 
English  pronunciation  ;  some  (like  Calais  which 
Englishmen  used  to  pronounce  Callis)  have  had  one 
and  lost  it.  We  can  never  be  thoroughly  systematic 
about  it,  but  the  man  is  a  fool  who  arbitrarily  selects 
some  foreign  word  which  we  have  incorporated  and 
attempts  to  denaturalise  it  again. 

"  Don  Quixote  "  is  not  the  only  name  now  being 
contested.  The  generation  has  not  yet  arisen  which 
will  suddenly  begin  caUing  Munich  Munchen,  but 
the  Trafalgar  affectation  has  been  in  full  swing  for 
some  years.  In  Nelson's  day  and  long  afterwards  all 
Englishmen  said  "  Trafalgar." 

'Twas  in  Trafalgar's  Bay, 
the  song  ran,  not — 

'Twas  in  the  Bay  of  Trafalgar. 

Then  somebody  discovered — what  was  no  doubt 
known  to  many  of  Nelson's  seamen,  not  to  mention 
Drake's  and,  for  all  I  know,  Hanno's — that  the 
Spaniards  accented  the  last  syllable.  Such  a  piece 
of  knowledge  was  too  precious  not  to  be  paraded, 
and  there  is  now  a  double  pronunciation.  The 
"  masses  "  still  stick  to  the  English  pronunciation  ; 
the  educated  are  almost  evenly  divided,  though  most 
of  them,  perhaps  say  Trafalgar  when  they  re- 
member to.  There  is  only  one  thing  to  be  said  in 
favour  of  Trafalgar.  Trafalgar  will  not  rhyme  ;   the 

20 


PRONUNCIATION 

battle  is  constantly  being  written  about  ;  and  Tra- 
falgar will  rhyme  very  nicely  with  words  like  star, 
avatar,  nenuphar,  bar,  and  cigar.  But  here  again  it 
is  easy  to  point  out  the  absurdity  of  the  priggish 
pronunciation.  The  twin  of  Trafalgar  is  Waterloo. 
No  foreigner  pronounces  that  word  as  we  do.  The 
local  pronunciation  is  Vaterlo  ;  and  when  a  French- 
man recites  Victor  Hugo's  stirring  stanzas  about  it 
he  says  : 

Vaterlo,  Vaterlo,  Vaterlo,  morne  plaine. 

Now ,  it  is  plainly  preposterous  to  make  a  great  effort 
to  pronounce  Trafalgar  like  an  Andalusian  whilst 
ignoring  the  French  and  Belgian  pronunciation  of 
Waterloo.  Possibly  "  Vaterlo  "  will  be  the  next 
affectation  ;  and  then  we  shall  be  asked  to  drop 
"  Rome  "  for  "  Roma." 

In  all  these  matters  of  pronouncing  foreign  names 
the  maxim,  not  always  appHcable  elsewhere,  clearly 
apphes,  "  what  was  good  enough  for  our  fathers  is 
good  enough  for  us."  Since  we  cannot  be  logical 
and  pronounce  all  foreign  words  as  foreigners  do, 
we  might  at  least  avoid  futile  pedantry  and  w^anton 
changes.  The  people  who  are  always  trying  to  im- 
pose these  tasks  on  our  clumsy  English  tongues  are 
always  either  men  who  are  proud  of  possessing  un- 
important knowledge  which  others  do  not  possess, 
or  still  baser  men  who  wish  to  be  thought  the  pos- 
sessors of  such  knowledge.  They  do  not  confine 
their  ravages  to  our  traditional  pronunciations  ; 
they  are  equally  fond  of  tinkering  with  spelHng.  It 
doesn't  much  matter  how  we  spell  the  name  of  a 
foreign  town  or  country  so  long  as  we  all  spell  it 

21 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

alike.  But  once  we  have  found  a  spelling  comfort- 
able it  is  maddening  to  have  to  aher  it  merely  be- 
cause some  vainglorious  fellow  has  seen  a  foreign 
map.  When  we  were  younger  all  Englishmen  spelt 
"  Corea  "  ;  that  has  gone,  and  "  Korea  "  has  taken 
its  place.  The  change  would  have  been  reasonable 
had  the  House  of  Commons,  the  British  Academy, 
the  Large  Black  Pig  Society,  or  some  other  body 
which  we  might  entrust  with  the  control  of  our 
orthography,  decided  that  all  our  hard  English  c's 
should  be  turned  into  k's.  But  we  just  pounce  on 
this  one  unhappy  word,  whilst  never  thinking  of 
bringing    Kochin    China,    the    Kaliph,    Kolombo, 
Kalkutta,  or  the  Kape  of  Good  Hope  into  line  with 
it.  It  is  no  good  saying  that  the  Koreans  and  the 
Chinese  use  a  k  and  not  a  hard  c  ;    for  they  use 
neither,   preferring  some  sign  which  looks  hke  a 
fragment  of  a  bird-cage.  Some  one  prig  was  origin- 
ally responsible   for  that  alteration,    and  he  had  a 
numerous  progeny  during  the  late  war.  There  was 
the  man  who  suddenly  began — and  half  of  the  others 
espied   him   within   a  month — calHng  the    Sea  of 
Marmora  the   Sea  of  Marmara,  having  seen  that 
spelling  in  a  French  paper,  or  perhaps  in  a  footnote 
of  Sir  Richard  Burton's.  He  was  a  kindred  spirit  of 
the  other  pioneer  who  dropped  the  "  o  "  out  of 
what,  until  the  war,  was  always  spelt  "  Roumania." 
Every  year  now  we  shall  find  the  attentions  of  these 
laborious  scholars  devoted  to  some  new  work.  Pos- 
sibly   Morocco    (our    spelling    cannot    conceivably 
represent  the  Moorish  spelling)  will  begin  appear- 
ing in  leading  articles  as  "  Marrakha,"  or   "  Mar- 
rakka,"  or  "  Marakh,"  or  some  such  thing.  Or  the 

22 


PRONUNCIATION 

gross  Englishdom  of  "  The  Hague  "  will  revolt  the 
fastidious  taste  of  some  journalist  who  has  done  a 
week's  walking  tour  in  Holland,  and  we  shall  be 
treated  to  Den  Haag  or  'S  Gravenshage  or  what- 
ever it  is.  Or  the  Bay  of  Napoli  will  start  creeping 
in,  or  the  Shah  of  Persia  will  become  the  Tchah  of 
Perzhia,  or  Bokhara  will  become  Bukhara,  or  Teheran 
will  become  Tihran.  We  cannot  prevent  these  point- 
less alterations  ;  needs  must  be  that  foUies  should 
come,  though  woe  unto  him  through  whom  they 
come.  But  as  individuals  those  of  us  who  desire  to 
avoid  affectation  and  prefer,  as  a  general  rule,  to  let 
well  alone  should  make  a  point  of  conforming  to 
existing  usage  in  spelling,  and  in  pronunciation,  of 
employing  those  sounds  which  are  more  comfort- 
able to  our  tongues  and  more  conformable  to  the 
English  language  and  traditions.  Next  time  my 
correspondent  refers  to  Cervantes  he  should  say 
Quixote  with  a  *'  q  "  and  with  an  "  x,"  and  say  it 
both  loud  and  clear.  If  anybody  looks  at  him  he 
should  then  repeat  it  without  shamefacedness.  And, 
provided  his  nerves  hold  out,  if  someone  should 
try  the  Spanish  pronunciation  on  him  after  he  him- 
self has  used  the  other,  let  him  pretend  not  to  under- 
stand. Above  all,  let  him  never  make  a  cowardly 
mumbling  noise  in  the  hope  that  it  may  be  taken 
for  either  pronunciation  of  any  word. 


23 


BY  LEWIS  CARROLL 

A  MAN  can  never  tell  where  he  will  find  books 
for  sale  nor  what  he  will  find  if  he  enters  the 
shop.  The  greatest  discovery  I  myself  ever 
made  was  made  in  a  grubby  second-hand  shop  off 
the  INIarylebone  Road,  where  a  few  dozen  dilapidated 
volumes  were  sprinkled  about  among  old  military 
medals,  cane  chairs,  Victorian  photographs,  and 
sooty  toilet-ware.  The  other  day  I  found  myself 
with  two  hours  to  spare  in  a  cathedral  town.  The 
rain  suddenly  began  to  come  down  in  solid  sheets. 
I  hurried  along  until  I  came  to  a  likely  doorway  and 
found  myself  in  another,  though  a  greatly  superior 
shop,  where  the  products  of  all  the  arts  lived  in 
harmonious  disarray.  The  books  numbered  some 
hundreds,  and  I  set  myself  to  a  systematic  inspection. 
Had  the  weather  been  finer  or  I  less  equable,  the 
inspection  would  not  long  have  continued.  I  have 
said  it  was  a  cathedral  town.  One  did  not  therefore, 
expect  to  find  piles  of  the  most  modern  literature, 
and,  in  fact,  there  was  none  save  a  few  novels,  such 
as  the  early  books  of  Mr.  Frankfort  Moore,  which 
had  been  at  last  superannuated  by  the  ladies  of  the 
Close.  And  the  old  books  were  considerably  more 
attractive  outside  than  inside.  Their  worn  jackets 
of  calf  or  pig  or  vellum  were  noble  ;  but  the  collec- 
tion of  dead  sixteenth,  seventeenth  and  eighteenth 
century  pedantry  they  contained  would  have  appalled 
Sir  John  Sandys  himself.  They  were  not  even  the 
works  of  the  best  known  of  dead  theologians  and 
editors  :  not  one  of  their  authors  had  been  heard  of 

24 


BY  LEWIS  CARROLL 

for  generations.  "  Some  of  these  must  be  rare," 
remarked  the  dealer  optimistically.  "  I  don't  doubt 
it,"  I  replied.  "  In  that  case,"  said  he,  "  if  one  could 
only  find  people  who  want  these  particular  books, 
we  should  get  good  prices  for  them."  His  logic  was 
irrefutable  ;  the  fact  he  ignored  was  the  very 
stubborn  fact  that  not  one  being  in  the  world  ever 
could  want  these  books.  Nevertheless,  I  opened  all 
the  big  ones  on  the  open  shelves,  then  all  the  little 
ones,  and  then,  still  hopeful,  the  lower  rows  in  a 
closed  cupboard.  Nothing  came  to  light.  I  do 
not  like  to  stay  a  long  time  in  a  shop  and  buy  nothing. 
I,  therefore,  gloomily  selected  the  Cambridge 
University  Calendar  for  1826 — which  is  somewhat 
out  of  date,  for  scarcely  half  of  the  present  dons  were 
on  the  books  then— and  a  late  copy  of  Somerville's 
"  The  Chase,"  and  prepared  to  go. 

It  was  the  hour  of  luncheon  ;  my  hands  were 
covered  with  dust  and  my  overcoat  sticky  with  cob- 
webs. I  began  searching  my  pockets  for  money.  But 
there  was  one  top  shelf  in  the  glazed  cupboard  which 
I  had  not  yet  reached.  One  never  knows  what  one 
W'ill  come  across,  I  reminded  myself.  Most  of  its 
contents  were  visible  at  a  distance  ;  dull  little  rows  of 
the  British  Essayists,  "  The  World,"  "The  Micro- 
cosm," "  The  Traveller,"  or  their  analogues.  But  a 
few  unlabelled  books  in  the  corner  were  worth  taking 
down,  and  I  took  them  down.  One  was  "  Reading 
Without  Tears,"  which  I  certainly  could  not  read 
without  tears  ;  there  were  also  pamphlets  about  grow- 
ing roses  and  resisting  sin  ;  and  there  were  volumes 
of  verses  by  extinct  spinsters  and  clergymen.  Almost 
the  last  I  reached  was  a  small,  liat-backed  book  in 

25 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

faded  dark  purple,  with  a  sober  blind-stamped 
pattern  around  the  covers  and  the  title,  in  large  gilt 
letters — comma  and  all — "  Index,  to  In  Memoriam," 
I  opened  it  :  "  Rare,  2s.  6d.,"  was  the  inscription. 
It  was  at  least  rare  enough  for  me  never  to  have 
heard  of  it,  though  it  was  published  by  Moxon  in 
1862,  and  carried  at  the  end  Moxon 's  January,  1862, 
list.  It  would  be  an  exaggeration  to  call  it  a  read- 
able volume.  It  is  not  an  entire  concordance,  but 
every  phrase  is  indexed  under  the  principal  nouns 
and  verbs  it  contains.  A  desire  to  economise  type- 
setting led  the  authors  to  abbreviate  the  main  words 
in  their  quotations.  The  result  is  forty  pages  in 
double  columns  filled  with  entries,  oddly  comic  in 
their  effect,  like  : 

I  do  but  s  because  I  must 

Grief  as  deep  as  / 

The  common  /  of  good 

Office  of  the  social  h 

Abuse  the  genial  h 

To  beat  the  g 

And  said  "  The  d,  the  d  " 

More  faith  in  honest  d 

Din  and  steam  of  t 

The  wof  "/"and"me." 

I  lingered  over  it,  and  then  I  looked  at  Moxon 's  list, 
a  list  which  would  do  credit  to  any  publisher. 
"  Works  by  the  Poet  Laureate  "  headed  it  ;  under- 
neath the  table  came — what  do  you  think  ? 

\*  The  above  works  are  always  to  be  had  in 
Morocco  Bindings. 

26 


BY  LEWIS  CARROLL 

Even  at  this  date  we  could  have  told  Mr.  Moxon 
that.  He  did  not  show,  however,  all  the  respect  he 
might  have  shown  to  the  Poet  Laureate.  There  was 
a  little  room  left  on  that  first  page  of  the  catalogue, 
and  he  squeezed  three  more  titles  into  it.  One  was 
Col.  George  Greenwood's  "Hints  on  Horseman- 
ship to  a  Nephew  and  Niece,"  no  doubt  an  excellent 
manual  enunciating  right  principles  and  warning 
against  dangerous  errors  ;  but  the  others,  cheek  by 
jowl  with  the  works  of  Tennyson,  as  though  there 
were  no  difference  between  them,  were  "  Athelstan, 
a  Poem,"  and  some  Lays  of  the  Better  Land,  by 
E.  L.    What  were  they  and  where  are  they  now  ? 

Haydn's  "  Dictionary  of  Dates  "  w'as  in  Moxon 's 
list  ;  so  were  the  works  of  Lamb  and  Hood,  the 
illustrated  editions  of  Rogers,  "  works  by  the  late 
William  Wordsworth,"  and  numbers  of  Coleridge's 
books,  including  the  second  edition  of  "  Biographia 
Literaria."  Mrs.  Shelley's  edition  of  Shelley  comes 
on  the  same  page  as  Goethe's  "  Faust,"  translated 
by  "  A.  Hayward,  Esq.,  Q.C."  This  was  Abraham, 
the  conversationalist  of  the  Athenaeum  Club  :  his 
prose  translation  was  already  in  its  seventh  edition, 
but  I  fancy  it  is  now  as  little  known  as  that  deplor- 
ably feeble  volume  of  original  verses  which  he 
allowed  himself  to  publish.  Hogg's  "  Life  of  Shelley" 
and  Trelawny's  "  Recollections  "  head  the  last  page 
with  two  other  books,  known  still  by  name  but 
scarcely  otherwise  :  Milnes'  Poems  in  three  volumes, 
and  Talfourd's  dramatic  works  in  one.  Talfourd 
certainly  had  fame  ;  this  was  the  eleventh  edition 
of  his  collected  plays.  But  he  fades.  Last  year  I  saw 
the  original  complete  manuscript  of  his  masterpiece 

27 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

"  Ion  "  offered  by  a  Scottish  bookseller  for  ^5.  Five 
pounds  :  and  I  was  not  even  tempted  to  buy  it. 
"  Rare,  2s.  6d.,"  ...  a  concordance,  which  I 
can  never  conceivably  use,  to  "  In  Memoriam  " 
.  .  .  Moxon's  list  of  fifty  years  ago.  .  .  .  "  I  think 
I  will  have  this,"  I  said.  I  turned  back  to  the  fly- 
leaf and  examined  an  inscription  I  had  casually 
noticed  there.  This  is  how  it  ran  : 

To  A.  W.  Dubourg  with  sincere  regards  from 
C.  L.  Dodgson,  one  of  the  compilers,  Oct.,  1873. 

I  passed  it  to  the  merchant  for  confirmation  of  the 
price.  He  also  glanced  at  the  inscription,  but  he  did 
not  take  it  in,  and  as  he  had  just  been  teUing  me, 
with  every  appearance  of  deUght,  of  the  rare  first 
editions  which  he  had  bought  for  next  to  nothing 
from  people  who  were  unfit  to  look  after  them,  I 
felt  no  scruple  about  refraining  from  explanation. 
C.  L.  Dodgson  was  Lewis  Carroll  ;  it  may  be  that 
his  Index  is  as  well  known  as  his  Alice  ;  I  at  least 
had  never  seen  it  before,  and  I  conceive  that  few 
people  know  the  book  and  fewer  will  know  that  he 
was  "  one  of  the  compilers."  I  imagined  that  con- 
versation in  1873,  eleven  years  after  that  labour  of 
love  had  been  completed.  Mr.  Dubourg  was,  I 
seem  to  have  heard,  a  Parliamentary  official  of  some 
sort.  Perhaps  they  were  intimate  friends  ;  or  per- 
haps they  met  occasionally  at  dinner  parties,  and 
one  evening  the  dialogue,  known  to  most  authors  in 
most  ages,  took  place  : 

Dubourg  :    I  don't  think  he's  ever  done  any- 
thing better  than  "  In  Memoriam." 
28 


BY  LEWIS  CARROLL 

DoDGSON  :  No  ;  I  agree  ;  it  is  a  beautiful 
thing  ;    I  read  it  constantly. 

DouBOURG  :  So  do  I  ;  but  I  wish  it  were  easier 
to  find  one's  way  about  it.  Somebody  ought  to 
make  an  index  to  it,  so  that  we  could  look  up  any 
particular  phrase. 

DoDGSON  {with  a  slightly  wistful  smile)  :  Oh, 
it's  been  done.  As  a  matter  of  fact  I  did  it  myself 
eleven  years  ago  ;  at  any  rate,  I  and  another  man. 
But  I'm  not  surprised  you've  not  seen  it.  Nobody 
ever  has. 

DuBOURG  :  Is  it  still  to  be  got  ? 

DoDGSON  :  I  shouldn't  think  so.  I  should 
imagine  it  w^as  remaindered  or  pulped  years  ago. 

DuBOURG  :  That  is  a  nuisance. 

DoDGSON  :  As  a  matter  of  fact  I've  got  about 
twenty  copies  at  home.  If  you  hke  I'll  send  you 
one  when  I  get  back. 

DuBOURG  :  Oh,  thanks  ever  so  much.  I  should 
love  to  have  one.  Don't  forget  to  write  your  name 
in  it. 

But  possibly  it  didn't  happen  Hke  this.  Possibly 
it  was  another  Dubourg.  Possibly — unpleasing 
thought — it  was  even  another  C.  L.  Dodgson.  I 
shall  look  it  up. 


29 


PRESS-CUTTINGS 

THERE  are  people  who  are  perpetually  curi- 
ous to  know  what  others  are  saying  about 
them  behind  their  backs.  Whenever  we  meet 
them  it  does  not  take  long  for  the  conversation  to 
drift  in  the  direction  of  their  preoccupation.  "  Some- 
body," remarks  the  person  of  this  type,  "  told  me 
the  other  day — I  can't  quite  believe  it— that  Jones 
told  a  party  at  Smith's  house  that  I  was  addicted 
to  cocaine.  Can  he  have  said  it,  do  you  think  ?  "  You, 
liking  everybody  to  be  happy,  and  perhaps  thinking 
Jones  capable  of  saying  almost  anything  when  flown 
with  insolence  and  wine,  reply  disingenuously  that 
the  report  is  ridiculous.  "I'm  sure,"  you  say,  "  that 
he  couldn't  have  said  anything  so  absurd,  except 
possibly  as  a  joke."  That  doesn't  get  you  out  of  it. 
"  It  didn't  come  to  me  as  a  joke.  I  wish  you'd  be 
honest  with  me.  I'd  much  rather  know  precisely 
where  I  stand  with  people."  If  you  have  self-com- 
mand, you  continue  to  produce  evasions  and  lies 
until  you  can  change  the  subject  ;  but  too  many 
people  yield  to  temptation  and  proceed,  under  a 
catechism  which  they  invite  whilst  pretending  not 
to  dislike  it,  to  repeat  all  the  backbitings  they  can 
remember.  The  questioner  never  really  wants  to 
hear  that  people  have  called  him  a  fool  or  a  bigamist, 
a  bad  artist  or  a  sponger  upon  the  public  purse. 
Sometimes  it  is  his  vanity  that  makes  him  imagine 
perpetual  conversations  about  himself  and  curious, 
at  whatever  cost,  to  get  an  inkling  of  them.  Some- 
times it  is  his  self-distrust  that   leads  him  to   be 

30 


PRESS-CUTTINGS 

perpetually  hunting  for  expressions  of  opinion  that 
will  buttress  him  up  in  his  own  esteem,  the  result  of 
his  searches  usually  being  precisely  the  opposite. 
"  What  did  he  say  about  me  ?  .  .  .  You  might  as  well 
tell  me.  ...  I  can  assure  you  I  shan't  mind."  But 
usually  they  do  mind. 

But  what  is  all  this  ?  you  will  ask.  These 
moralisings  may  be  true  and  even  trite,  but  why 
do  they  appear  here  on  a  page  supposed  to  have 
something  to  do  with  books  and  their  authors  ? 
Reader,  what  you  have  just  perused  is  a  first  para- 
graph. The  essential  thing  about  the  art  of  writing 
an  essay  is  that  you  should  not  plunge  at  once  into 
the  subject  you  intend  to  discuss.  Lead  the  reader 
gradually  to  it.  That  way  you  will  give  him  a  sur- 
prise, and  produce  also  the  illusion  that  he  has  shared 
in  a  wandering  train  of  thought.  All  the  best  essay- 
ists do  it  ;  many  of  them,  I  beUeve,  do  the  beginnings 
of  their  essays  last,  and  start  them  at  as  remote  a 
point  from  the  main  theme  as  possible.  Myself,  I 
am  forgetful,  hasty,  spontaneous,  naturally  candid 
and  devoid  of  artifice.  But  I  have  remembered  this 
time  ;  even  yet  1  have  not  reached  my  subject ;  I  feel 
a  certain,  as  I  hope  justifiable,  pride  in  the  achieve- 
ment ;  and  I  trust  I  may  be  pardoned  for  calling 
the  reader's  attention  to  it.  That  first  paragraph  is 
by  no  means  perfect  ;  for  it  had,  as  will  be  seen,  a 
direct  relation  with  my  subject.  The  subject  wasn't 
actually  mentioned  ;  but  a  master  of  the  mode  would 
have  begun  with  "  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  once  said,"  or 
"  When  Layard  was  digging  in  the  ruins  of  Nineveh," 
or  "  I  was  walking  down  Bishopsgate  one  day  last 
week."  Never  mind  ;  so  far  as  it  goes  it  is  all  right. 

31 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

And  now  for  the  subject  proper,  which  impalpably 
dawns  at  this  stage  Uke  the  sun  sHpping  out  of  the 
barred,  low  clouds  of  morning  twilight,  I  conceive 
of  authors  who  too  avidly  study  their  press-cuttings 
as  in  the  same  unfortunate  position  as  those  too 
curious  listeners. 

It  all  arose  really  out  of  a  conversation  with  a  man 
of  genius,  for  whose  character  and  art  I  have  great 
respect.  He  told  me  that  he  was  in  the  habit  of  read- 
ing his  press-cuttings,  and  that  sometimes  they 
gave  him  acute  pain  and  even  kept  him  awake. 
People  said  such  malicious  things  ;  other  people 
thoughtlessly  said  such  unfair  things.  Why  weren't 
people  more  amiable,  more  careful,  more  inclined 
to  assume  that  they  had  no  monopoly  of  decency, 
sense,  and  artistic  ideals  ?  "  Why  on  earth,"  I  asked 
him,  "  do  you  subscribe  to  these  things  if  they 
upset  you  ?  "  He  couldn't  exactly  say.  He  had 
contracted  the  habit,  and  the  habit  had  become  a 
disease.  He  hoped  he  would  have  the  resolution  to 
break  himself  of  it  ;  but  he  wasn't  sure.  Nor  am  I. 
I  doubt  if  he  will. 

I  have  met  a  good  many  authors  who  have  had 
this  experience.  I  know  several  who  refrain  from 
buying  press-cuttings  and  even  from  searching  the 
papers  for  reviews  of  their  own  books.  Some  of  them 
know  that  they  will  either  be  bored  or  irritated  by 
the  great  majority  of  the  references  to  their  works  ; 
others  are  frankly  indifferent.  No  sensible  person, 
I  take  it,  is  totally  incurious  about  criticism  of  him- 
self. Informed  criticism  is  interesting,  maybe  useful, 
and,  if  favourable,  warms  the  heart.  But  in  point  of 
fact  I  don't  think  that  the  author  who  refrains  from 

32 


PRESS-CUTTINGS 

the  systematic  collection  of  press-cuttings  is  likely 
to  miss  much  that  should  really  interest  him.  He 
and  his  friends  will  be  in  the  habit  of  seeing  most  of 
the  journals  in  which  serious  criticism  is  likely  to 
appear  ;  everything  really  complimentary  is  pretty 
certain  to  be  brought  to  his  notice  ;  he  will  be  lucky 
if  accident  or  the  well-meant  effort  of  misguided 
acquaintance  stops  short  at  that.  Even  if  a  criticism 
of  any  seriousness  appears  in  a  local  paper  in  the 
Orkneys,  somebody — very  likely  the  author  of  it — 
will  probably  draw  his  attention  to  it.  If  not,  no 
harm  is  done  :  the  main  purpose  of  current  criti- 
cism being  to  keep  the  public  informed,  not  to  give 
authors  a  happy  or  unhappy  five  minutes  at  break- 
fast. Let  persons  who  are  easily  wounded  check 
their  morbid  curiosity  and  leave  press-cuttings  alone. 
Nine  reviews  out  of  ten  are  not  worth  reading. 

The  one  kind  of  man  who  should  and  will  go  on 
getting  press-cuttings  is  the  man  who  likes  absurd- 
ities. I  knew  one  signal  example  of  this.  I  used  to 
stay  with  him.  Little  pink  bundles  of  cuttings 
arrived  almost  every  morning.  He  would  open  them, 
unroll  them,  glance  rapidly  through  them.  The  long 
commentaries  from  "  serious  "  papers  he  would 
glance  at,  giving  a  grunt  of  satisfaction  if  they 
appeared  to  be  good  advertisements,  but  not  reading 
them.  He  had  his  own  opinion  of  his  merits  ;  for 
the  rest  he  was  interested  in  the  criticism  of  certain 
friends.  But  he  would  put  aside  anything  grotesquely 
short  and  summary,  any  paragraphs  from  **  gossip  " 
columns,  any  reviews  from  very  outlandish  places, 
like  Sligo  or  Kirkcaldy.  These  promised  well,  and 
he  went  through  them  closely.  Every  now  and  then 

33  D 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

he  would  laugh  with  great  complacency  and  pass 
one  across,  for  it  contained  something  preposterous, 
some  absurdly-worded  laudation  or  quite  extrava- 
gant abuse.  And  the  pearls  he  would  keep.  The  best 
out  of  many  years'  supply  he  had  hung,  mounted  and 
framed,  around  his  study.  Over  the  desk  were  three 
portraits  of  other  men  with  his  own  name  falsely 
printed  underneath  them — mistakes  made  by  news- 
papers. Dominant  above  the  fireplace  was  a  row  of 
invectives  :  one  provincial  scribe  had  called  him  a 
pretentious  ignoramus,  and  another  a  sinister  cynic. 
He  liked  it.  That  is  the  kind  of  man  for  whom  press- 
cuttings  are  worth  while.  The  others,  I  think,  would 
be  far  better  off  without  them.  It  is  not  healthy  for 
men  to  get  into  the  way  of  hungering  for  notice  and 
brooding  over  casual  and  ephemeral  things  said 
about  them  by  Tom,  Dick,  or  Harry. 


34 


ON  KNOWING  AUTHORS 

I  MET  a  man  who  said  he  had  met  another 
man.  "  I  ahvays  thought,"  he  said,  "  that  he 
was  one  of  the  best  people  alive,  hut  1  found 
him  disappointingly  commonplace."  I  suggested,  as 
unobtrusively  as  I  could,  that  if  the  original  con- 
ception was  right  the  gentleman  could  not  possibly 
be  commonplace  ;  though  it  might  be  his  natural 
habit  or  his  whim  to  confine  his  conversation  with 
strangers  to  commonplace  topics.  It  wasn't  the  first 
time  I've  heard  such  a  remark  ;  in  fact,  I  have  often 
heard  would-be  hero-worshippers  say  despondently 
that  they  are  almost  always  disappointed  in  great 
men  when  they  meet  them.  But  what  portents  do 
they  expect  ? 

You  stand  with  an  artist  drinking  cocktails  at  the 
American  bar  in  the  Royal  Automobile  Club,  or 
you  sit  next  to  him  at  a  dinner  in  the  Fishmongers' 
Hall,  or  you  meet  him  at  an  evening  party  in  a 
friend's  house,  or  you  are  introduced  to  him  in  the 
street.  Those  are  the  sort  of  encounters  you  have 
with  a  man  w^hom  you  do  not  know  very  well.  You 
talk  about  other  people,  whether  they  are  nice, 
nasty,  clever,  foolish,  generous,  spiteful,  ill,  well, 
prosperous,  or  in  difficulties  ;  or  you  exchange 
notes  about  Mr.  Lloyd  George  ;  or  you  discuss 
American  prohibition  ;  or  you  ask  each  other  if  you 
have  read  "  War  and  Peace,"  Andre  Gide,  or  the 
posthumous  novels  of  Henry  James.  Your  con- 
versation, in  fact,  is  ordinary  human  conversation  ; 
the  poet  or  the  romantic  novelist  or  the  metaphysician 

35 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

is  as  likely  as  anybody  else  to  ask  you  what  is  going 
to  win  the  Derby,  why  the  Irish  want  separation, 
which  is  the  best  village  in  Cornwall  for  a  family's 
summer  holiday,  or  whether  there  is  a  chance  that 
the  medical  profession  will  some  day  discover  some- 
thing about  influenza.  He  will,  assuming  he  does 
not  live  behind  an  impenetrable  wall  of  silence,  be 
at  worst  an  ordinary  talker  and  at  best  a  brilliant 
one.  But  in  the  general  way  he  will  not  be  uncom- 
monly profound  or  passionate  or  tender.  This  often 
leads  people  to  say  that  they  are  disappointed  in 
artists  ;  the  men  do  not  come  up  to  their  works. 
A  little  reflection  will  demonstrate  that  it  is  im- 
possible that  artists  should  lack  qualities  which  are 
really  present  in  their  works. 

I  mean  qualities  of  thought  and  feeling.  A  man 
may  have  the  gift  of  literary  and  not  the  gift  of  vocal 
expression.  Goldsmith  "  wrote  like  an  angel  and 
talked  like  poor  Poll."  The  extreme  instance  would 
be  a  dumb  man,  who  might  nevertheless  be  the 
most  eloquent  of  essayists.  Some  men  talk  as  well 
as  they  write  ;  some  better  than  they  write  ;  some 
as  they  write  ;  and  some  differently.  But  nothing 
can  come  out  of  a  man  except  what  is  there,  and  if 
you  find  a  sympathetic  heart  in  a  man's  writing 
which  he  does  not  show  over  the  cocktails,  it  merely 
means  that  over  the  cocktails  he  is  too  reserved, 
proud,  shy,  preoccupied,  or  merely  interested  to 
show  it.  Keats,  at  the  Burford  Bridge  Hotel,  would 
not  have  talked  to  stray  acquaintances  in  the  strain 
of  "  Lone  star,  would  I  were  stedfast  as  thou  art " ; 
even  with  his  friends,  or  with  Fanny  Brawne  in  per- 
son, he  would  not  be  doing  that  all  the  time.  Elderly 

36 


ON  KNOWING  AUTHORS 

memoirists  still  insist  on  describing  Browning  as  "  a 
red-faced  diner  out,"  and  exclaiming  at  an  apparent 
incompatibility  between  his  conviviality  and  his 
poetry.  This  is  mere  lack  of  imagination.  What 
you  clearly  have  to  do  is  to  reconcile  the  two,  to 
realise  that  men  are  many-sided,  and  that  Browning 
was  merely  an  unusually  striking  demonstration  of 
the  fact  that  men  do  not  commonly  show  their 
deeper  sides  in  public.  The  rubicund  old  gentleman 
who  took  Lady  Edith  down  to  dinner  was  not 
entirely  absorbed  in  eating  and  gossiping  ;  he  did 
not  secrete  poems  unconsciously  in  his  sleep.  That 
morning  he  had  been  wrestling  in  prayer  or  harassed 
by  the  evil  in  the  world  ;  even  at  moments  amid 
the  silk  and  silver  and  glass  of  the  dinner-party 
there  were  intervals  when,  whilst  his  lips  were 
bantering  or  chatting  about  Lord  Granville  or  the 
Russians  or  the  Royal  Academy,  he  saw  eternity 
through  his  surroundings,  all  the  gaiety  and  the 
grandeur  fading  like  a  flower,  or  throbbed  at  the 
beauty  of  a  remembered  sea  or  ached  with  an  old 
remembered  grief. 

And  so  your  artist,  if  he  really  has  something  in 
him,  when  you  meet  him  in  the  street,  or  at — it  is 
possible — a  croquet  competition,  or  on  the  Dover- 
Ostend  boat,  or  at  a  committee  meeting  of  the 
Authors'  Society.  Do  you  expect  him  suddenly  to 
buttonhole  you  and  ask  you  if  you  are  saved  ?  Do 
you  expect  him  to  go  on  his  knees  and  pray,  insist 
on  calling  your  attention  to  the  tints  of  his  liqueurs, 
rhapsodise  over  hghts  and  shadows,  and  confide  in 
you  the  dreams  of  his  first  love,  or  of  how  he  sweated 
last  night  when  he  faced  the  imminence  of  Death  ? 

37 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

Certainly  not.  Yet  it  is  of  such  things  that  art  is 
made  ;  it  is  emotions  and  reflections  of  this  nature 
which  we  ordinarily  find  in  the  art,  and  suppose, 
casually  meeting  him,  not  to  exist  in  the  artist  who 
has  put  them  there.  Shakespeare,  as  we  know,  was 
obliged  to  spend  part  of  his  time  signing  deeds, 
arranging  mortgages,  and  suing  people  for  debt  ; 
one  can  hear  his  contemporaries  saying  to  each 
other,  "  How  that  fellow  can  have  written  '  To- 
morrow, and  to-morrow,  and  to-morrow  '  beats 
me."  The  fact  is  that  he  wrote  it,  and  that  what  in 
him  it  sprang  from  was  present  when  he  was  in  the 
Law  Courts  and  present  when  he  was  at  the  Mer- 
maid, being  rebuked  (sufflaminandus  erat)  by  mutton- 
fisted  Ben  for  excessively  voluble  high  spirits. 

The  fact  is  that  the  mere  routine  of  living  takes 
most  of  our  time,  and  that  few  men  live  with  their 
hearts  perpetually  on  their  sleeves.  An  artist  has  at 
least  his  art  for  communication  ;  outside  that  he  is 
only  like  the  generality  of  mankind  if  he  seldom  shows 
his  best  and  deepest  sides.  Even  a  sensitive  man's 
most  intimate  friends  will  seldom  get  into  so  close 
a  contact  with  him  as  one  establishes  at  once  if  one 
reads  a  good  book.  There  are  moments  when  by 
imperceptible  gradations  two  people — rarely  more 
than  two  together-fall  into  confidences  and  unlock 
the  secret  thoughts,  visions,  and  hankerings  of  years. 
We  have  all  known  such  moments  and  we  treasure 
the  memory  of  them.  It  is,  perhaps,  as  well  that  we 
do  not  systematically  seek  them  ;  anyhow,  to  the 
person  of  imagination  they  are  not  very  necessary. 
Artist  or  not,  there  is  always  a  man  behind  the  mask. 
About  the  artist  we  have  more  information.  That  is 

38 


ON  KNOWING  AUTHORS 

why  "  character  sketches  "  of  business  men  or 
politicians  are  nearly  always  interesting,  whereas 
"  character  sketches  "  of  artists  tell  us  nothing  that 
we  did  not  know  already — tell  us  much  less,  in  fact. 
For  the  artist  himself  has  already  told  us  everything 
that  he  has  to  say. 


39 


A  RETURN 

I  HAVE  been  to  America,  my  friendship  to  which 
country  is  now  established  on  an  even  more  solid, 
and  liquid,  basis  than  before.  Going,  I  imagined 
that  I  should  post  a  weekly  essay  from  there  ;  if  I 
may  say  so,  without  irreverence  to  that  continent, 
my  road  to  America  was  paved  with  good  intentions  ; 
but  the  moment  I  got  into  the  Hudson  and  saw  a 
grey  silent  mass  in  the  distance  of  dawn,  the  con- 
gregation of  high  buildings  on  Manhattan,  I  knew 
I  was  doomed.  There  would,  at  any  moment  of  the 
day  or  night,  always  be  something  more  interesting 
to  see  than  my  own  handwriting.  But  that  may  look 
as  though  I  made  a  deliberate  choice  in  the  matter  ; 
the  truth  being  that  I  was  a  straw  in  the  wind,  and 
should  have  fulfilled,  with  the  excitement  of  that 
country  around  me,  no  previously  contracted 
obligations,  however  sacred,  however  lucrative  even. 
My  will  abdicated  and  conscience  went  to  sleep. 

I  may  at  least  plead  this,  not  as  an  excuse,  but  as 
something  on  the  credit  side  :  that  I  am  not  going 
to  write  a  book  about  America.  This  is  very  un- 
usual. So  unusual  that  I  found  it  to  be  incredible. 
Many  Americans  refused  to  believe  me  when  I  told 
them  so  ;  after  all  I  had  been  in  the  country  six 
weeks.  Oh,  yes,  I  could  write  the  book.  I  can  see  it 
all,  on  the  model  consecrated  by  generations  of 
travelling  men  of  letters.  There  would  be  the  chapter 
on  the  voyage,  the  good  ship  "  Dipsomania"  leaving 
Liverpool,  the  strange  faces  of  the  foreign  immi- 
grants  going  to  Eldorado,  the  community  life  in 

40 


A  RETURN 

mid-Atlantic,  the  preliminary  conversation  with 
the  shrewd  and  quiet  American  on  the  ship,  con- 
scious of  all  his  country's  problems,  conversant  with 
everything  that  had  been  said  about  them,  opening 
out  to  a  really  sympathetic  foreigner  ;  the  Overture 
to  the  orchestral  discussion  which  would  come  later, 
accustoming  the  reader's  ears  to  all  the  principal 
motifs.  Then,  after  this,  would  come  the  approach, 
the  new  chapter  beginning  "  We  entered  the  Hudson 
in  the  grey  of  morning,"  and  containing  remarks 
about  the  magnificence  of  New  York  harbour,  the 
disappointing  unimpressivcness  of  the  Statue  of 
Liberty,  and  the  magnificence*  of  the  great  group 
of  Down  Town  skyscrapers,  "  Especially  at  night, 
when   .  .  ." 

The  rest  is  all  cut  and  dried.  I  could  do  that 
chapter  on  New  York,  with  remarks  on  the  latest 
architecture,  the  management  of  the  traffic,  the 
luxury  of  the  shops,  the  frequency  of  Jews  and 
ItaHans,  the  character  of  the  theatres,  the  jolly 
splendours  of  the  Great  White  Way,  the  strange  fate 
of  little  old  Trinity  Church  among  the  giant  office, 
buildings,  the  unpicturesque  convenience  of  mun- 
bered  streets,  the  glories  of  the  Metropolitan  IMuseum 
and  certain  private  collections  over  which  I  w\is 
courteously  shown  by  Mr.  X  and  Mr.  Y,  and  the 
traffic  over  Brooklyn  Bridge,  mingled  with  reflec- 
tions on  the  existence,  nature,  and  purpose  of 
American  hustling,  the  differences  between  New 
York  and  London  papers,  the  extent  to  which 
American  men  and  women  are  or  are  not  better  or 
more  fashionably  dressed  than  the  inhabitants  of 
London,  and  the  question  as  to  how  much  sleep  the 

41 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

average  New  Yorker  gets.  Similar  chapters  or  half- 
chapters  would  be  devoted  to  Philadelphia,  Wash- 
ington, Chicago,  and  Boston.  The  formulse  are  all 
ready. 

Philadelphia,  although  a  city  of  two  millions, 
still  retains  something  of  the  dignity  and  gravity 
of  an  old  Quaker  town.  Many  of  the  streets  have 
a  distinct  Colonial  quality,  and  the  big  buildings 
are  neither  very  numerous  nor  very  tall.  .  .  . 

Washington  is  said  by  those  who  know  it  to  be 
the  pleasantest  place  in  the  world  to  live  in.  Digni- 
fied, reposeful,  umbrageous,  blessed  with  fine  air 
and  beautiful  natural  surroundings  and  possess- 
ing a  permanent  population  which  .  .  . 

Chicago,  to  the  man  who  has  formed  his  ideas 
from  "  The  Jungle,"  has  a  good  many  pleasant 
surprises.  The  stockyards  do  exist,  and  so  do  the 
slimis  and  the  immigrants.  But  the  parks  are  .  .  . 
the  principal  shopping  streets  are  .  .  .  and  above 
all  the  magnificent  drive  along  the  Lake  Shore  is 
.  .  .  whilst  the  generosity  of  millionaire  bene- 
factors has  .  .  .  and  the  vast  buildings  of  the  new 
University  are  .  .  . 

Boston,  to  some  extent,  keeps  its  character  .  .  . 
Lowells  .  .  .  Lodges  .  .  .  Henry  James  .  .  . 
Harvard  .  .  .  But  in  our  own  time  it  has  greatly 
expanded  and  it  is  now  largely  an  Irish  city  .  .  . 
What  Boston  thinks  of  the  rest  of  America  .  .  . 
what  the  rest  of  America  thinks  of  Boston.  .  .  . 

Memory,  and  a  Baedeker,  would  soon,  I  think,  make 
five  thousand  words  apiece  out  of  these.  And  then 

42 


A  RETURN 

we  should  pass  on  :    "I  did  not  visit  the  West, 
but  ..." 

How  Conservative  is  the  South  !  What  a  riddle  is 
the  Middle  West  !  How  remote  is  California  and 
how  peculiar  her  conditions  !  In  Charlestown  they 
still  remember  General  Lee  and  the  injustices  of 
Mr,  Lincoln.  In   Cincinnati  they  are  mainly  Ger- 
mans.   That   is    all    very   straightforward,    but    we 
should  be  compelled  at  last,  after  our  general  im- 
pressionistic survey  giving  a  rough  idea  of  the  vast 
variety  of  cHmates  and  social  conditions,  to  come 
to    certain    specific    subjects    of    debate.    Without 
immodesty,  I  think  I  could  do  that  chapter  on  the 
New   Immigration.   I  should   get — as  lazy  authors 
do  not  always  get — some  statistics  ;    but  I  should 
be  quite  on  the  approved  lines  in  my  remarks  on 
the  dangers  of  an  unchecked  flow,  on  the  clash  of 
cultures  ;  on  the  respective  degrees  to  which  various 
kinds  of  foreigners  can  be  absorbed  ;  on  the  domin- 
ance of  the  Anglo-Saxon  ;   on  the  effect  of  the  war 
and  recent  legislation  upon  the  inflow  from  Central 
and  Southern  Europe,  and  on  the  systematic  efforts 
at  "  Americanisation."  Then  the  Colour  Problem, 
the  qualities  of  the  negro,  the  impossibility  of  mis- 
cegenation, lynchings,  Booker  Washington  and  Du 
Bois,  negro  schools,  Jim  Crow  cars,  the  Southern 
Darkie,   the   need   for   careful   consideration   of   a 
question  which  has  no  apparent  solution.  Then  the 
Economic    Structure,    wholesale    agriculture     and 
meat-raising,    centralisation,    specialisation,    mass- 
production,    trustification.     Then    Politics  :    Why 
respectable   people   seldom    go   into   them,   stories 
about  graft,  the     spoils    system,  the    police,    city 

43 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

government  and  Tammany  Hall — with  some  hope- 
ful signs  and  the  City  Managers'  plan.  Then 
Education  :  Hundreds  of  Universities  and  hundreds 
of  thousands  of  undergraduates  ;  the  attempt  to 
make  an  Educated  Democracy — this  is  only  a  Be- 
ginning, at  present  the  exceptional  Individual  is 
hardly  catered  for  ;  the  need  of  an  Honours  System; 
Athletics,  nev^  buildings,  the  Harkness  Quadrangle, 
libraries,  benefactors.  Then  the  Millionaires  :  Their 
endowments,  their  collections,  their  way  of  life, 
their  power,  the  public  attitude  towards  them,  the 
various  sorts  of  them.  But  why  proceed  }  Look  at 
the  chapter  headings  of  twenty  books  about  America, 
rapidly  written  by  the  rapidly  peregrinating,  and 
you  will  have  a  good  idea  of  this  unwritten  book  of 
mine.  It  would  surely  be  so  easy.  And  they  might, 
if  I  were  vivacious  and  fortunate,  run  it  as  a  serial 
in  the  pages  of  a  magazine. 

Yet,  if  I  had  written  that  book,  I  think  there  might 
have  been  a  few  pages  in  it  that  would  not  have 
appeared  in  most  of  the  others.  I  remember  certain 
landscapes  and  certain  small  towns  which  I  am  not 
likely  ever  to  forget — New  England  bound  with 
ice  ;  Frankfort  in  its  wooded  gorge  ;  Charlottes- 
ville in  Virginia,  with  the  lovely  Georgian  quad- 
rangle in  a  high  valley  among  tree- covered  conical 
hills,  with  the  Blue  Ridge  Mountains  in  the  dis- 
tance ;  Annapolis,  with  the  grey  Navy  buildings 
reflected  in  the  lagoon  and  behind  them  a  perfect 
eighteenth-century  town,  quiet  in  the  sunshine, 
streets  of  old  brick  houses  radiating  from  the  knoll 
on  which  stands  the  Augustan  State  House.  The  new 
things    cannot    be    ignored,    nor    the    multitudes  ; 

44 


A  RETURN 

problems  we  have  and  problems  we  must  discuss  ; 
but  I  cannot  help  wishing  that  some  time  or  another 
an  English  traveller  with  leisure  and  sensibilities 
and  a  style  should  think  it  worth  while  to  go  through 
the  East,  or  the  South,  or  the  West,  or  even  the 
middle  of  the  United  States,  as  so  many  have  gone 
through  Sussex,  France,  the  Rhineland,  Italy,  Spain, 
India,  and  Japan— looking  for  the  beautiful,  the 
amusing,  the  curious,  the  humane  in  landscapes 
and  people,  thinking  of  the  individual  and  of  the 
past  more  than  of  the  crowd  and  the  future,  leaving 
sociology  and  anxiety  to  others. 


45 


THE  KING  OF  PRUSSIA 

I  OPENED  a  book  casually  and  began  reading  an 
essay  on  Frederic  the  Great  of  Prussia,  once 
known  to  these  islands  as  "  The  Protestant 
Hero,"  given  a  new  vogue  by  Carlyle,  but  at  present 
somewhat  under  a  cloud  owing  to  the  perpetuation 
of  the  worst  of  his  procHvities  in  his  descendants. 
Suddenly  I  came  upon  a  passage  about  his  literary 
compositions  ;  certain  of  them  were  commended, 
but  not  his  poems.  "  Nobody,"  ran  the  curt  sentence, 
"  can  now  read  his  verses." 

How  rash  such  statements  are  !  It  would  hardly 
be  safe  to  assert  that  nobody  can  now  read  Rollin, 
Sir  Richard  Blackmore,  or  the  encyclopaedia  of 
Vincent  of  Beauvais.  "  Very  few  can  read  ..." 
"it  is  not  easy  to  conceive  that  anybody  can  read 
.  ,  .  ,"  "  the  man  must  have  plenty  of  time  to  waste 
who  reads  .  .  .  ,"  "he  must  be  an  eccentric  fool 
who  reads  .  .  ."  :  all  these  openings  would  be 
quite  safe  in  reference  to  hosts  of  old  books.  But  the 
man  who  confidently  writes  "  nobody  can  now 
read  "  does  so  at  his  risk.  As  I  saw  those  dogmatic 
words  my  soul  uprose  in  pride.  "  I  can,"  it  said, 
"  and,  what's  more,  I  have."  The  answer  was  accurate 
and  complete.  I  once  read  Frederic's  poems,  I  found 
a  mild  pleasure  in  reading  them,  and  I  have  now, 
under  this  adventitious  incentive,  been  looking  at 
them  again. 

I  don't  mean  to  say  that  I  hunted  for  them,  or 
that  I  wasn't  happy  until  I  got  them.  I  could  have 
lived  my  life  quite  at  my  ease  without  ever  catching 

46 


THE  KING  OF  PRUSSIA 

a  glimpse  of  them.  It  was  pure  accident  that  brought 
into  my  hands  a  copy  of  Frederic's  poems,  and  I 
should  probably  never  have  looked  at  them  had  I 
not  possessed  a  copy  of  my  own.  I  picked  it  up  in  the 
sixpenny  box  of  a  bookseller  who  did  not  know  them 
for  what  they  were,  as  there  is  no  author's  name  on 
the  title-page.  The  book  is  rather  remarkable.  The 
title  is  "  Poesies  Diverses,"  and  the  edition  was 
published  in  Berlin  in  1760  by  Christian  Frederic 
Voss.  The  royal  author,  or  his  publisher,  spared  no 
expense.  The  volume  is  a  handsome  quarto,  gilt 
edged  ;  the  paper  is  good  and  the  print  handsome  ; 
and  the  pages  are  embellished  with  decorations  on 
the  best  French  models  of  the  time.  It  was  the  great 
age  of  copper-plate  pictures,  and  the  German 
artists,  Meil  and  Schmidt,  did  their  Teutonic 
best  to  follow  in  the  footsteps  of  the  French  masters. 
The  frontispiece  is  a  full-page  engraving  of  a  nude 
and  bearded  person  with  vast  thews,  sitting  on  a 
rock  at  a  cave's  entrance,  and  contemplatively  play- 
ing a  seven-stringed  lyre.  There  are  tailpieces  full 
of  nmsical  instruments,  goddesses,  cupids,  clouds, 
clarions,  and  Dresden  shepherds  and  shepherdesses 
languorously  reclining  amid  sylvan  bowers,  and 
there  are  really  charming  initials  everywhere.  But 
where  the  artist — in  this  instance,  Schmidt — really 
laid  himself  out  (no  doubt,  under  instruction)  was 
in  the  big  series  of  engravings  illustrating  L'Art  de 
la  Guerre.  The  armoured  prince  is  shown  in  every 
stage  of  operation.  He  is  crowned  with  laurel,  he  is 
girded  by  Bellona,  he  directs  an  attack  on  a  town 
amid  a  hail  of  large  cannon-balls,  he  examines  a 
map,  he  surveys  his  hosts  from  a  hill,  he  leads  them 

47 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

into  a  city,  and  he  reclines  on  a  sofa  with  his  spouse, 
whilst  his  young  prattlers  pull  off  his  boots.  And 
this,  on  the  whole,  is  Frederic's  most  interesting 
poem. 

He  wrote  twenty  epistles  and  a  number  of  odes, 
including  some  addressed  to  Gresset,  Maupertius, 
and  Voltaire,  whom  he  addresses  as 

Fils  d'Apollon,  Homere  de  la  France. 

They  all  have  a  certain  flavour  of  personality  about 
them,  but  it  is  in  the  art  of  war  that  one  naturally 
finds  most  piquancy,  and  it  is  the  most  ambitious 
of  Frederic's  efforts.  It  is  in  six  cantos  ;  a  sort  of 
solemn,  extended  monologue,  full  of  scraps  of 
history,  sketches  of  operations,  and  elevated  senti- 
ments. A  certain  amount  is  talked  about  glory.  It 
comes  into  the  peroration,  and  it  comes  at  the  be- 
ginning, where  the  "  young  Prince  "  is  exhorted  : 

ecoutez  les  legons  d'un  soldat, 
Qui  forme  dans  les  camps,  nourri  dans  les  allarmes, 
Vous  appelle  a  la  Gloire,  et  vous  instruit  aux  armes. 

But  Frederic  is  not  to  be  taken  as  a  militarist.  He 
has  seen  too  much  of  "  ces  ravages  sanglans,"  and 
he  urges  the  General  to  control  his  soldiers,  and  calls 
maledictions  on  the  cruel  commander  who  plunders 
and  ravages  and  permits  wanton  carnage.  No  : 

Je  ne  vous  offre  point  Attila  pour  modele  ; 
Je  veux  un  Heros  juste,  un  Tite,  un  Marc  Aurele  .  . , 
Tombent  tous  les  lauriers  du  front  de  la  Victoire, 
Plutot  que  1 'injustice  en  ternisse  la  gloire. 

48 


THE  KING  OF  PRUSSIA 

It  is  extraordinary  how  Attila  seeins  to  haunt  the 
Hohenzollern  imagination. 

Frederic's  poems  are  certainly  prosaic  as  a  rule. 
But  they  are  not  alone  in  their  dullness  in  that 
century,  and  they  are  less  dull  than  some  ;  I  don't 
find  Armstrong's  "  Art  of  Preserving  Health,"  once 
so  celebrated,  as  Hvely.  Frederic  wrote  the  unin- 
spired, argumentative  discourses  and  the  formal 
apostrophes  common  in  his  time  both  in  France 
and  England.  His  collected  works  in  verse  and  prose 
fill  many  volumes  ;  the  prose  is  said  to  be  good, 
and  the  reasoning  sometimes  acute.  Whatever  the 
literary  value  of  his  work,  I  imagine  that  he  was  the 
most  prolific  writer  who  has  ever  sat  on  a  European 
throne.  "  A  long  time  ago  the  world  began  "  ;  Marcus 
Aurelius  was  a  great  writer,  and  I  dare  say  the  com- 
positions of  King  Alfred  were  very  remarkable  for 
their  period.  But  royal  poets  since  then  have  been 
more  numerous  than  fertile  ;  and  we  may  fairly  say 
that,  with  the  exception  of  James  I  of  Scotland,  who 
wrote  the  "  King's  Quair,"  no  modern  sovereign 
has  taken  the  job  of  writing  verse  more  seriously.  In 
fact,  to  the  best  of  my  remembrance — though  I  am 
rather  hazy  about  all  the  Stanislases  and  Wenceslases 
of  the  old  Polish  and  Bohemian  realms  — there  is  no 
near  rival  to  him. 

Certainly  our  own  EngUsh  monarchs  do  not  com- 
pete. A  few  verses  apiece  are  ascribed  to  many  of 
them.  CcEur  de  Lion  is  reputed  to  have  written  a 
Provencal  song  lamenting  that  he  had  spent  two 
winters  unransomed  in  prison  ;  possibly  he  got 
Blondel  to  write  it  for  him.  To  Edward  II  is  ascribed 
a  Latin  poem  complaining  of  his  lot,  and  to  Henry  VI 

49  E 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

an  English  one  on  the  theme,  "  Kingdoms  are 
but  cares,"  and  there  are  some  grounds  for  ascribing 
to  Henry  VIII  a  group  of  lyrics.  The  best  is 
"  Pastime  with  Good  Company."  There  is  also  one 
beginning  : 

As  the  holly  groweth  green, 

And  never  changeth  hue, 
So  am  I,  and  ever  have  been, 

Unto  my  lady  true. 

I  can  only  say  that  if  he  really  wrote  that  and  read 
it  to  his  courtiers,  they  must  have  found  it  rather 
difficult  to  control  their  faces.  Edward  VI  is  credited 
with  a  longish  poem  arguing  about  the  Eucharist, 
and  his  sister  Elizabeth  with  several  vigorous  lyrics, 
including  one  about  Mary  Queen  of  Scots,  "  the 
daughter  of  debate  that  discord  aye  doth  sow."  Of 
James  VI  and  I,  the  British  Solomon,  there  is  no 
doubt.  He  published  two  volumes  of  verse,  one  of 
which  (1584)  was  called  "  The  Essays  of  a  Prentise," 
and  his  collected  works  in  verse  and  prose  were 
published  in  161 6.  If  only  his  sonnets  were  as  racy 
as  his  "  Counterblast  to  Tobacco,"  they  would  be 
worth  having.  Charles  II,  if  he  really  wrote  "  I  Pass 
All  My  Hours,"  which  has  been  imputed  to  him, 
would  have  employed  himself  well  in  writing  more. 
With  the  Stuarts  our  literary  monarchs  apparently 
ended  ;  the  poems  of  George  HI  and  William  IV, 
if  they  wrote  any,  have  never  seen  the  Hght. 


50 


JOHN  POMFRET 

NOBODY  knows  everything  or  remembers 
everything  he  has  known.  If  you  talk  long 
enough  to  the  most  learned  of  literary  men 
you  will  find — in  the  end — some  quite  unexpected 
gap  in  his  erudition.  But  I  must  say  that  I  was  more 
than  ordinarily  surprised  to  find  Mr.  Maurice 
Hewlett  saying  that  he  hadn't  heard  of  Pomfret. 
Mr.  Hewlett  is  writing  on  James  Lackington,  the 
celebrated  cheap  bookseller  of  a  century  ago.  Pomfret 
one  would  have  supposed  to  be  far  more  widely 
known  than  Lackington  ;  he  gets  space  of  a  sort  in 
all  the  literary  histories,  whereas  Lackington's 
delicious  Memoirs  are  the  private  pastime  of  a  few 
explorers  like  Mr.  Hewlett,  who  knows  English  and 
French  memoir-literature  inside-out.  Mr.  Hewlett's 
precise  words  are  : 

"  Pomfret 's  Poems  "  inspire  little  enthusiasm 
in  me  who,  I  am  sorry  to  say,  know  nothing  of 
them  or  their  Pomfret. 

Well,   time   was   when   Pomfret's   "  Choice  "   was 
known  to  every  Englishman  who  read  verse. 

John  Pomfret,  son  of  the  Vicar  of  Luton,  was 
born  in  1667  and  educated  at  Queens'  College, 
Cambridge.  In  1695  he  became  Vicar  of  Maulden, 
in  Bedfordshire,  and  in  1702  transferred  to  Mill- 
brook.  He  married  in  1692.  In  1703  he  died,  and 
his  death  is  supposed  to  have  been  hastened  by  a 
very  unfortunate  contretemps.  At  the  end  of  his 
celebrated  poem  he  wrote  : 

51 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

Would  bounteous  Heaven  once  more  indulge,  I'd 

choose 
(For  who  would  so  much  satisfaction  lose 
As  witty  nymphs  in  conversation  give) 
Near  some  obliging  modest  fair  to  live. 

To  this  fair  creature  I'd  sometimes  retire, 
Her  conversation  would  new  joys  inspire. 

And  as  I  near  approach  the  verge  of  life, 
Some  kind  relation  (for  I'd  have  no  wife) 
Should  take  upon  him  all  my  worldly  care, 
While  I  did  for  a  better  world  prepare. 

When  Pomfret  (who  had  been  married  for  years) 
applied  to  Dr.  Compton,  Bishop  of  London,  for 
institution  to  a  fat  living  (he  already  had  two)  to 
which  he  had  been  presented,  enemies  or  fools 
represented  to  the  Bishop  that  this  passage  was 
immoral.  It  implied,  they  said,  that  Pomfret  thought 
concubinage  preferable  to  marriage.  The  Bishop,  a 
weak  man,  listened  to  this  slander.  Pomfret  hastened 
to  London  to  dispel  it.  In  London  he  caught  small- 
pox, and  he  died  from  it. 

Pomfret 's  poems  appeared  in  1699.  "  The  Choice" 
at  once  overshadowed  all  its  companions.  The 
"  Poems  "  as  a  collection  had  reached  their  tenth 
edition  in  1736,  but  "  The  Choice  "  was  continually 
reprinted  by  itself,  in  anthologies  and  otherwise. 
Four  quarto  editions  of  it  appeared  in  the  single 
year  1701.  Dr.  Johnson  said  "  Perhaps  no  com- 
position in  our  language  has  been  oftener  pursued 

52 


JOHN  POMFRET 

than  Pomfret's  'Choice.'"  In  1807  (Pomfret  still, 
and  for  years  after  that,  was  being  reprinted) 
Southey  asked  "  Why  is  Pomfret  the  most  popular 
of  the  English  poets  ?  The  fact  is  certain,  and  the 
solution  would  be  useful."  Campbell,  eleven  years 
after,  according  to  Birkbeck  Hill,  "  thus  criticised 
this  statement  :  It  might  have  been  demanded  with 
equal  propriety,  why  London  Bridge  is  built  of 
Parian  marble."  But  some  years  had  passed  ;  the 
romantic  age  had  begun  ;  and  the  evidence  of 
Johnson,  the  bookseller's  son,  is  certainly  not  con- 
tradicted by  the  experience  of  one  who  rummages 
amongst  the  secondhand  bookshops  of  to-day. 

Granted  that  "  The  Choice  "  was  the  most  popu- 
lar, at  any  rate  one  of  the  most  popular  of  English 
poems  (amongst  the  crowd,  be  it  understood) 
Southey 's  question  is  not  difficult  to  answer.  "  He 
who  pleases  many,"  said  Johnson,  "  must  have 
some  species  of  merit."  He  described  Pomfret's 
merits  thus  : 

His  "  Choice  "  exhibits  a  system  of  life  adapted 
to  common  notions  and  equal  to  common  ex- 
pectations ;  such  a  state  as  affords  plenty  and 
tranquillity,  without  exclusion  of  intellectual 
pleasures.  ...  In  his  other  poems  he  has  an 
easy  volubility  ;  the  pleasure  of  smooth  metre  is 
afforded  to  the  ear,  and  the  mind  is  not  oppressed 
with  ponderous  or  entangled  v.ith  intricate  senti- 
ment. 

The  common  sentiments  were  much  the  same  as 
those  expressed  in  another  (and  a  far  better)  popular 
poem  of  the  same  era.  Dr.  Walter  Pope's  "  The 

S3 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

Old  Man's  Wish."  Our  young  clergyman  sat  down 
and  imagined  how,  given  a  free  hand,  he  would 
arrange  the  rest  of  his  life.  Almost  everybody  has 
done  it.  Pomfret  did  it  honestly,  and,  in  so  doing  it, 
naturally  reflected  the  desires  of  a  great  many  other 
people.  "  Blissful  ease  and  satisfaction  "  was  his 
aim  ;  no  crowded  hours  of  glorious  Ufe  for  Pomfret. 
He  would  have,  near  a  town,  "  a  private  seat,  built 
uniform,  not  little  nor  too  great."  The  desired  land- 
scape is  described  ;  the  furniture  shall  not  be 
gaudy  ;  there  shall  be  "  a  silent  study  "  looking 
out  on  a  lime  tree  avenue  and  a  river.  All  the  best 
authors  will  be  on  the  shelves,  and  the  poet's  morn- 
ings will  be  spent  "  in  pleasing,  useful  studies."  He 
will  have  an  estate  large  enough  to  have  a  margin 
for  the  poor  and  the  occasional  obliging  of  a  friend. 
His  table  will  be  healthy,  but  not  luxurious,  and  : 

I'd  have  a  little  vault,  but  always  stor'd 
With  the  best  wines  each  vintage  could  afford. 
Wine  whets  the  wit,  improves  its  native  force. 
And  gives  a  pleasant  flavour  to  discourse  : 

We  come  next  to  his  friends.  He  will  have  two  : 

whose  company  would  be 
A  great  advance  to  my  felicity. 

They  are  to  be  well  born,  discreet,  knowing  books 
and  men,  "  brisk  in  gay  talking,  and  in  sober,  grave," 
"  close  in  dispute,  but  not  tenacious,"  "  not 
quarrelsome,  but  stout  enough  to  fight,"  And  then 
we  come  to  the  faithful  female  friend,  whose  char- 
acter is   described   extraordinarily  well.   A  quietly 

54 


JOHN  POMFRET 

varied  life,  free  from  lawsuits  ;  a  ripe  old  age  ;  a 
peaceful  death  : 

And  when  committed  to  the  dust,  I'd  have 
Few  tears,  but  friendly,  dropt  into  my  grave. 

"  The  Choice  "  has  still  sufficient  charm  to  be  worth 
reading,  although  in  this  age  nobody  even  dreams 
of  enjoying  a  quiet  life. 

Some  of  Pom  fret's  lesser  poems  are  extremely 
weak  and  dull.  The  best  of  them  is  perhaps  a  neat 
address  "  To  a  Friend  Inclined  to  Marry."  Modera- 
tion in  all  things  is  the  counsel  of  this  as  it  is  the  key- 
note of  "  The  Choice  "  ;  and  a  taste  for  cosiness  is 
again  strongly  manifested.  The  last  lines  run  : 

Her  fortune  competent  ;   and,  if  thy  sight 
Can  reach  as  far,  take  care  'tis  gathered  right. 
If  thine's  enough,  then  her's  may  be  the  less  ; 
Do  not  aspire  to  riches  in  excess. 
For  that  which  makes  our  lives  delightful  prove, 
Is  a  genteel  sufficiency  and  love. 

We  may  charitably  suppose  that  he  put  the  "  suffi- 
ciency "  before  the  love  for  the  convenience  of  his 
rhyme.  But  "  love  and  a  genteel  sufficiency  "  is  a 
delightful  Augustan  modification  of  "  love  in  a 
cottage." 


55 


CANDID  BIOGRAPHY 

WHO'S  WHO  "  and  "  The  Literary  Year 
Book  "  are  not  such  modern  institutions 
as  you  might  think  or  as  I  thought  until 
the  other  day.  I  noticed  in  a  catalogue,  and  at  once 
bought  for  too  large  a  price,  a  work,  one  hundred 
and  five  years  old.  The  title-page  is  open  before  me. 
I  will  transcribe  its  text,  as  it  illustrates  rather  well 
how  our  manner  of  expressing  ourselves  has  altered. 
The  modern  equivalent  of  such  a  work  would  be 
given  some  such  name  as  "  The  Author's  Who's 
Who  "  or  "  A  Directory  of  Living  Writers."  But  in 
the  year  after  Waterloo  this  is  how  they  put  it — and 
in  a  variety  of  types,  small  and  large,  roman,  italic, 
and  gothic,  which  I  am  not  going  to  distract  my 
printers  by  attempting  to  reproduce  : 

A 
Biographical  Dictionary 

OF  THE 

LIVING  AUTHORS 

OF 

Great  Britain  and  Ireland 

comprising 

Literary  Memoirs  and  Atiecdotes  of  Their  Lives  ; 

and  a 

Chronological  Register  of  Their  Publications, 

With  the  Number  of  Editions  Printed, 

including 

Notices  of  Some  Foreigfi  Writers  Whose  Works  Have 

Been  Occasionally  Published  in  England, 

56 


CANDID  BIOGRAPHY 

illustrated  by 
A   VARIETY    OF    COMMUNICATIONS 

From  Persons  of  the  P'irst  Eminence  in  the 
World  of  Letters. 

LONDON. 

Printed  for  Henry  Colburn, 

Public  Library,  Conduit   Street,  Hanover  Square. 

1816. 

There  follows  a  dedication  to  His  Royal  Highness 
the  Prince  Regent,  in  which  his  attention  to  the  Arts 
is  respectfully  commended  and  the  influence  of 
Britain  in  the  world  is  described  in  Johnsonian 
periods  culminating  in  "  Thus  have  Morals  and 
Letters  consecrated  what  Victory  has  achieved  and 
Commerce  extended."  Paraphrased  this  comes  to 
"  Trade  follows  the  Flag,  and  Morals  and  Letters 
follow  Trade."  But  let  us  hasten  on. 

The  Preface  gives  the  reasons  for  such  a  pub- 
lication and  supplies,  incidentally,  the  very  aston- 
ishing information  that  the  most  important  previous 
guide  to  living  British  authors  had  been  published 
in  German,  in  Berlin,  by  a  Gottingen  Professor. 
We  then  come  to  the  first  of  four  hundred  and  fifty 
large  pages  full  of  biographies,  an  extraordinary 
monument  of  erudition.  Virtually  everybody  who 
had  ever  written  a  book  was  included  ;  even  the 
obscurest  curate  who  had  let  slip  a  pamphlet  sermon 
in  Exeter  or  Lichfield  has  his  line  or  two  giving  his 
college  and  degree.  The  first  name  is  that  of  Mr. 
Speaker  Abbott  (afterwards  Lord  Colchester)  who, 
on  the  strength  of  three  legal  treatises,  is  given  a  full 

57 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

length  biographical  summary,  which  tells  us,  for 
example,  that  he  was  born  "  about  1755,"  and  was 
once  Lieutenant- Colonel  of  the  North  Pevensey 
Legion  of  Volunteer  Cavalry.  Ansther  Abbott  was 
the  author  of  "  Flora  Bedfordiensis,"  and  the  other 
gentlemen  on  page  one  include  a  mineralogist,  two 
sermonising  clergymen,  a  legal  expert.  Dr.  Aber- 
nethy,  and  a  Dr.  Adair,  whose  numerous  works 
include  "  Unanswerable  Objections  Against  the 
Abolition  of  the  Slave  Trade  "  (he  had  a  job  in  the 
West  Indies)  and  a  boldly  intituled  work,  "  Essays 
on  Fashionable  Diseases,"  8vo,  1790.  These  speci- 
mens attest  the  scope  of  the  work  ;  but  how  were 
the  really  great  men  then  living  treated  ? 

Shelley  and  Keats  were  not  before  the  public, 
and  Jane  Austen  was  still  anonymous,  but  we  may 
make  a  fair  test  with  Byron,  Scott,  Wordsworth, 
Coleridge,  Blake,  Leigh  Hunt,  Lamb,  Landor, 
Peacock,  Crabbe,  Hogg,  and  Campbell.  The  first 
two,  already  popular,  came  off  fairly  well,  though 
nothing  like  so  well  as  Sheridan,  to  whose  compli- 
cated career  pages  are  devoted.  Scott,  Walter,  Esq., 
is  described  as  "  one  of  the  clerks  of  the  Court  of 
Session,  and  Sheriff  Deputy  for  the  Shire  of  Sel- 
kirk." Figures  of  his  sales  are  "  subjoined,"  and 
under  the  account  of  Byron  we  find  this  rough,  rude 
sentence  : 

It  is  remarkable  that  the  two  first  poets  of  the 
age  should  both  have  been  lame  from  their  in- 
fancy ;  yet  such  is  the  case  with  Lord  Byron  and 
Mr.  Walter  Scott. 

But  what  of  those  who  are  now  considered  greater 
58 


CANDID  BIOGRAPHY 

poets  ?  Well,  here  is  Wordsworth's  biography,  all 
he  gets  : 

Wordsworth,  William,  Esq.,  late  of  St.  John's 
College,  at  Cambridge,  and  at  present  distributor 
of  stamps  for  the  counties  of  Cumberland  and 
Westmoreland.  This  gentleman  stands  at  the 
head  of  a  particular  school  of  poetry,  the  char- 
acteristic of  which  is  simplicity.  His  publications 
are.  .  ,  . 

And  all  they  have  to  say  of  Coleridge  is  : 

Coleridge,  S.  T.,  a  native  of  Bristol  and  for- 
merly a  member  of  Jesus  College,  Cambridge,  When 
the  late  Sir  Alexander  Ball  was  appointed  Governor 
of  Malta,  Mr.  C.  went  with  him  in  quaHty  of 
Secretary.  He  has  latterly  been  engaged  in  read- 
ing lectures  on  Poetry  and  the  Belles  Lettres, 
and  has  published  : 

There  is  no  evident  malice  in  this  ;  merely  lack 
of  understanding.  As  for  Blake,  he  is  described  as 
"  an  eccentric  but  very  ingenious  artist,  formerly 
of  Hercules  Buildings,  Lambeth,  afterwards  living 
at  Feltham,  in  Sussex,  and  principally  the  engraver 
and  publisher  of  his  own  designs." 

There  is  no  literary  criticism  in  the  account  of 
Leigh  Hunt,  which  ends  : 

His  last  speculation  was  successful,  owing  to 
the  virulence  of  its  politics,  which  brought  upon 
him  a  prosecution  for  a  libel  against  the  Prince 
Regent,  and  he  is  now  in  confinement  in  the  New 
Gaol,  Horsemonger  Lane. 

59 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

There  is  a  slight  touch  of  pleasure  about  this.  It 
is,  in  fact,  ever^-where  evident  that  the  compilers, 
although  they  do  not  resort  to  boycott,  object  to 
extreme  politicians.  Radical  journahsts  are  con- 
tinually described  as  "  persons,"  other  biographees 
being  usually  "  gentlemen,"  and  a  long  Ufe  of 
Cobbett  contains  the  statement  that  the  success  of 
the  Weekly  Register, 

notwithstanding  the  monotonous  political  ter- 
giversation and  occasional  coarseness  of  the 
author,  has  raised  Mr.  C,  to  affluence,  and  en- 
abled him  to  purchase  a  valuable  estate,  at  Botley, 
in  Hampshire. 

Charles  Lamb  is  dismissed  with  four  lines  and  a 
list  of  works  ;  they  know  nothing  of  him  except 
that  "  he  is  at  present  a  clerk  in  the  India  House," 
and  was  at  Christ's  Hospital.  Landor  has  three  lines, 
which  seem  to  suggest  that  his  career  is  over.  Pea- 
cock (who  had  as  yet  published  only  three  poorish 
books)  is  one  of  the  minority  about  whom  not  one 
biographical  fact  is  given.  The  Ettrick  Shepherd  is 
given  a  few  friendly  words,  and  Crabbe  is  com- 
mended as  "  deservedly  one  of  the  most  distinguished 
poets  of  the  present  day."  Of  Campbell  little  is  said 
except  that  he  was  given  a  pension  by  Lord  Gren- 
ville  for  writing  political  paragraphs.  Southey's  early 
revolutionism  is  decried,  but  it  is  handsomely 
observed  that  : 

In  1 813  he  succeeded  Mr.  Pye  as  Poet  Laureate, 
and  it  must  be  admitted  that,  with  some  slight 

60 


CANDID  BIOGRAPHY 

exceptions,  his  subsequent  performances  arc  such 
as  do  credit  to  the  appointment. 

Hazlitt,    as    yet    unknown    as    a    critic,   is    barely 
mentioned. 

Whatever  the  critical  references  of  the  work  no- 
body could  say  it  was  not  lively.  Here  are  a  few 
characteristic  entries  : 

Wilde,  John,  Esq.,  F.R.S.,  and  Professor  of 
Civil  Law  in  the  University  of  Edinburgh.  .  .  . 
Unfortunately  his  professional  and  literary  career 
was  closed  by  a  sudden  mental  derangement 
which,  becoming  incurable,  he  was  confined  in  a 
private  receptacle  for  lunatics,  but  out  of  respect, 
however,  to  his  talents,  he  was  still  suffered  to 
retain  nominally  his  professorship  of  civil  law, 
and  Mr.  Irving,  the  acting  lecturer,  is  obliged  to 
allow  him  half  the  salary. 

Williams,  Helen  Maria.  This  celebrated  lady 
has  recently  published  a  volume  which,  if  it  does 
not  completely  atone  for  the  bad  qualities  of  her 
former  works,  will  at  least  entitle  her  to  respect. 

Meeke,  Mrs.  One  of  the  numerous  family  of 
novelists  whose  prolific  genius  is  always  labour- 
ing to  increase  the  stock  of  the  circulating  libraries. 
Her  performances  are  .  .  . 

Shirrefs,  Andrew,  M.A.,  a  bookbinder  at 
Aberdeen,  who  has  lost  the  use  of  both  of  his  legs. 

Yate,  Walter  Honywood,  Esq.,  late  of  St. 
John's  College,  Oxford,  a  Justice  of  the  Peace, 
and  Deputy  Lieutenant  of  the  County  of  Glouces- 
ter.  This  gentleman,  though  a  great  enemy  to 

6i 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

public  corruption,  and  a  zealous  advocate  for  Par- 
liamentary reform,  was,  a  few  years  since,  divorced 
at  the  suit  of  his  wife,  on  a  charge  of  adultery  and 
cruelty.  He  has  published  .  .  . 

How  much  brighter  "  Who's  Who  "  would  be  if 
its  biographies  were  built  on  this  model. 


62 


REJECTED  CONTRIBUTIONS 

EDITORS  are  a  variegated  lot.  Dan  Leno 
was  once  an  editor,  so  was  Mr.  C.  B.  Fry  ; 
I  have  been  an  editor  myself,  and  amongst 
my  friends  there  is  an  editor  who  is  a  man  with  a  soft 
heart.  He  was  exchanging  experiences  with  me  this 
week.  He  said,  and  I  commended  him  for  it,  that  he 
always  made  a  point  of  himself  reading  all  manu- 
scripts submitted  to  him. 

This  is  more  virtuous  than  some  people  might 
imagine.  It  might,  at  first  sight,  seem  obvious  that 
all  manuscripts  should  be  read,  and  all  manuscripts 
would  be  read,  by  the  person  who  solicited  them 
and  was  nominally  responsible  for  selecting  the  best 
among  them.  Ideally,  the  practice  is  certainly  desir- 
able, and  an  enthusiast  will  struggle  hard  to  live  up 
to  the  ideal.  But  a  little  reflection  will  bring  the 
realisation  that  to  anybody  but  an  enthusiast  there 
is  a  great  temptation  to  be  slack  about  it,  and  that 
even  the  enthusiast  encounters  very  disheartening 
obstacles.  A  man  may  be  extremely  keen  not  to 
overlook  anything  worth  the  printing,  and  anxious 
to  assist  promising  and  obscure  authors,  but  it  takes 
a  lot  of  disinterested  interest  and  much  patience  to 
plough  through  a  daily  pile  of  manuscripts  from 
outside  contributors.  For  many  of  them  are  written 
in  difficult  hands,  many  are  long  articles  or  stories 
which  are  patently  intelligent  and  must  be  read 
right  through  before  their  merits  can  be  finally 
estimated,  and  even  of  them  those  which  are  really 
suitable  for  publication  in  the  paper  to  which  they 

63 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

are  pent  bear  a  very  small  nropurticni  to  the  whole. 
I  cannot  say  offhand  what  proportion.  But  judging 
from  my  own  experience  of  papers  which  have 
searched  their  posts  with  the  utmost  eagerness  for 
acceptable  work  and  have  been  swamped  with  manu- 
scripts from  an  educated  public,  I  should  say  that 
the  accepted  or  acceptable  poems  or  articles  or  stories 
cannot  amount  to  one  in  a  hundred  of  the  unsolicited 
manuscripts  sent  in.  It  is,  I  gladly  agree,  worth  it. 
The  person  who  encourages  the  one  in  a  hundred 
may  be  doing  excellent  service  to  literature,  which  is 
what  literary  journalists  profess  to  be  there  for.  But 
it  is  Serbonian  work  and  the  novelty  of  it  soon  wears 
off,  as  the  expectation  of  miracles  fades  and  the 
consciousness  of  probabilities  grows. 

Some  unsolicited  manuscripts  are  mad,  some  are 
hopelessly  feeble,  most  are  merely  amateurishly 
incompetent.  They  are  probably  written  by  persons 
who  never  get  into  print  and  whose  spark  seldom 
flickers  into  manuscript.  Writers  of  very  occasional 
poems  or  stories  number  thousands,  probably  hun- 
dreds of  thousands.  An  editor  in  the  course  of  a  year 
will  receive  great  drifts  of  poems  from  persons  whom 
he  kno\AS  and  whom  he  never  suspected  of  writing 
verses,  and  who  probably  conceal  their  procHvities 
from  their  friends  pending  their  recognition  by 
acceptance.  These  no  doubt  feel  slightly  damped — 
anybody  must — when  they  are  turned  down  with  a 
printed  rejection  form  or  even  with  a  friendly, 
wriggHng,  disingenuous  letter  in  which  laboured 
compliments  and  excuses  form  a  very  diaphanous 
covering  for  the  extremely  bare  fact  of  rejection.  It 
is  a  beastly  thing,  to  an  imaginative  man,  this  job  of 

64 


REJECTED  CONTRIBUTIONS 

systematically    throwing    cold    water    on    people's 
aspirations. 

On  a  certain  summer  evening,  when  the  sky  is 
still  green  in  the  west,  twenty  men  and  women, 
greybeards,  youths,  girls  with  bobbed  hair,  march 
out  (or  send  out)  to  pillar-boxes  with  long  envelopes 
addressed  to  a  certain  periodical.  The  envelope  goes 
into  the  red  jaws,  it  sticks,  it  is  pushed,  it  falls  plop 
upon  the  imagined  pile  inside,  it  is  irretrievable, 
and  the  author  goes  home  wondering  what  is  going 
to  happen  this  time.  A  week  passes  or  a  month,  and 
then  one  morning  twenty  people  who  have  half- 
forgotten  or  who  Hve  in  a  perpetual  fever  of  remem- 
brance come  down  to  twenty  breakfast-tables  to  find 
lying  there  twenty  envelopes  addressed  in  the  well- 
known  hands  of  the  recipients.  Gloom  settles  over 
them.  Some  have  doubts  about  their  own  abilities. 
All  have  doubts  about  the  abilities,  or  the  honesty, 
or  the  carefulness,  or  the  human  decency  of  the 
editor  who  has  spurned  them.  It  is  in  an  editor's 
power  to  give  any  one  of  them  an  hour's  happiness 
(not  to  mention  a  guinea  or  two)  or  an  hour's  un- 
happiness.  How  hard  a  choice  to  make. 

I  am  depressed  when  I  think  of  any  rejected  con- 
tributor, but  I  am  depressed  most  of  all  when  I  think 
of  the  frequently  and  perennially  rejected.  The 
most  curious  tribe  of  habitual  authors  in  this  country 
are  those  v>'ho  are  known  only  to  editors.  There  are 
several  men  in  London,  a  lady  in  Macclesfield, 
another  in  Exeter,  whose  handwritings,  styles,  and 
manners  of  thought  are  as  well  known  to  half-a- 
dozen  London  editors  as  those  of  Mr.  Conrad,  Mr. 
Arnold  Bennett,  and  Mr.  Kipling.  They  enjoy,  or 

65 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

rather  they  do  not  enjoy,  a  kind  of  subterranean 
fame.  The  neighbours  of  Mr.  Noah  Davis,  of  Edg- 
baston,  may  or  may  not  know  that  he  writes,  but 
they  know  him  chiefly  as  a  bank  clerk  or  a  school- 
master who  is  interested  in  books  and  wears  his  hair 
a  little  longer  than  is  customary.  But  in  five  or  six 
rooms  in  Fleet  Street  or  Bedford  Street,  Strand,  or 
the  Adelphi  nothing  is  known  about  him  personally 
except  his  inmost  self,  his  ambitions,  his  ideals,  his 
conception  of  what  he  can  do,  his  behefs  about  love 
and  religion,  his  vocabulary,  his  rhythm,  and  (as  I 
said)  his  handwriting.  There  are  men,  very  Ukely, 
who  have  never  seen  his  face,  but  who  have  seen  his 
handwriting  two  or  three  hundred  times.  Nothing 
deters  him.  On  Monday  his  poem  on  "  A  Level 
Crossing  at  Night  "  goes  back  to  him,  and  on  Thurs- 
day arrives  his  article  on  "  The  Organisation  of  the 
Provincial    Theatre."    Pertinacity    Hke    that    took 
Columbus  to  America,  and  it  will  take  Mr.  Davis 
nowhere.  He  cannot  know  it  himself,  but  everybody 
who  ever  sees  his  work  knows  it.  Nevertheless,  he 
plugs  on.  *'  They  haven't  got  accustomed  to  my 
thought  yet,"  he  reflects,  "  but  even  these  pudding- 
heads  will  see  light  in  time."  Back  comes  the  last 
thing.  There  is  another  ready  and  away  it  goes. 
"Dear.  Sir,  I  beg  to  enclose  a  manuscript  entitled 
Dash,  which  I  hope  you  will  find  suitable  for  pub- 
Hcation.  If  you  are  unable  to  use  it  would  you  kindly 
return  it.  Stamped  and  addressed  envelope  enclosed." 
Unfortunate    Mr.    Davis    of    Edgbaston.    Poor 
Colonel  Doggins  of  Richmond.  Sorely-tried  Miss 
Martha  Jiminy  of  Penzance.  Gallant  but  misguided 
Edgar  Chalkhill  of  Wimbledon,  so  young,  so  keen, 

66 


REJECTED  CONTRIBUTIONS 

so  immature,  so  patently  incapable  of  maturity  ! 
Some  of  them  keep  return  envelopes  on  which  their 
addresses  are  printed  ;  whether  to  impress  or  to  save 
the  labour  of  writing  I  do  not  know.  But  every  morn- 
ing on  the  desks  of  which  I  am  thinking  a  communi- 
cation from  at  least  one  of  their  brotherhood  reposes. 
It  will  be  looked  at  with  a  weary  eye,  and  it  will  go 
the  way  of  all  its  predecessors.  For  the  manuscripts 
of  some  authors  are  like  homing  pigeons.  You  may 
release  them  wherever  you  like,  hut  they  will  make 
straight  back  for  the  familiar  cote. 


67 


AN  INDIAN  BARD 

JESTING  at  the  expense  of  Baboo  English  is 
easy,  and  it  may  be  done  in  the  wrong  spirit. 
Our  own  undergraduates,  if  called  on  to  write 
essays  in  Urdu  or  Tamil,  would  beyond  doubt  equal 
the  best  efforts  of  Jabberjee,  B.A.,  and  I  doubt  if 
many  of  us  would  be  sufficiently  enterprising 
(granted  that  India  was  occupying  England)  to 
attempt  to  compose  poetry  in  the  tongues  of  Hin- 
dustan. There  is  always  a  something  of  admiration 
mingled  with  my  amusement  when  I  see  the  metrical 
efforts  of  our  Indian  fellow-subjects.  At  the  same 
time,  it  is  no  good  disguising  the  amusement — 
since,  humanly  speaking,  it  is  impossible  that  the 
gentlemen  who  awake  it  will  ever  be  aware  of  it — 
and  it  cannot  be  denied  that  the  English  com- 
positions of  Indians  occasionally  surpass  the  worst 
that  our  native  versifiers  can  ever  perpetrate.  I 
remember  copying  out  some  time  ago  a  remarkable 
quatrain  I  had  found  in  a  volume  from  Madras.  It 
ran  : 

In  ancient  days  ere  Britons  ruled  our  Ind, 

No  man  but  mocked  at  Life,  at  Honour  grinned, 

But  now  benignant  British  banners  have  swiftly 

brought 
Security  of  life  and  pelf  and  freedom  of  Thought. 

Well,  a  correspondent,  out  of  the  goodness  of  his 
heart,  has  now  sent  me  a  book  every  page  of  which  is 
on  that  level. 

68 


AN  INDIAN  BARD 

Its  title  is  "  Priceless  Pearls,"  a  good  enough  be- 
ginning. Its  author  was  Mr.  A.  S.  H.  Hosain,  and  it 
was  published  at  Calcutta  in  1S90.  There  is  a  dedi- 
cation to  Sir  Steuart  Colvin  Bayley,  at  that  time 
Lieutenant-Governor  of  Bengal.  Sir  Steuart  was 
honoured  with  what  the  native  printer  termed  a 
"  Dedicatory  Epitle  "  in  verse.  These  are  two  verses 
from  it  : 

Though  Ind  has  thinned  thy  stature  tall 
The  Lion's  heart  and  soul  is  there. 
There  is  the  noblest  human  blood, 
May'st  thou  enjoy  the  Lion's  share. 

With  hopeful  and  with  heart  sincere 
To  thee,  my  work  I  dedicate. 
With  Lion's  clemency  I  hope 
My  humble  aim  thou  will  not  hate. 

After  which  we  come  to  the  main  part  of  the  book, 
a  long  poem  on  the  Nativity  of  the  Prophet. 

This  is  full  of  delightful  quatrains,  but  I  prefer 
to  quote  from  the  shorter  poems  w^hich  follow^  it, 
notably  from  that  on  the  Cuckoo.  We  have  had 
celebrated  poems  on  the  Cuckoo  ourselves,  and 
they  are  not  notably  good.  The  best  known,  which 
has  crept  into  most  of  the  anthologies,  begins  : 

Bird  of  the  wilderness 
BHthesome  and  cumberless, 

a  couplet  which,  I  believe,  had  it  occurred  in  a  work 
by  a  Baboo  would  have  been  treated  as  a  rich  ex- 
ample of  comic  English.  But  we  cannot  really  vie 

69 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

with  Mr.  Hosain.  This  is  his  equivalent  of  "  blithe- 
some and  cumberless  "  : 

Great  Natures'  wonder  great  art  thou. 
Thy  exterior  greatly  doth  beUe 
The  beauty  and  the  solid  worth 
Of  thy  interior  noble  high. 

Thou  lover  sweet  of  rural  seat. 
Thy  choicest  home  is  Mangoe  tree  ; 
Whence  thou  let'st  flow  thy  music  sweet 
With  mirthfulness  and  cheerfulness  and  glee. 

Some  of  the  hues  that  follow  are  normal  and  straight- 
forward, such  as  "  There  is  no  Autumn  in  thy 
year  "  and  "  Whoever  saw  thee  in  the  nest  ?  "  : 
but  the  former  is  adapted  from  "  There  is  no 
Winter  in  thy  year  "  in  Michael  Bruce 's  "  Cuckoo," 
and  one  hardly  beUeves  that  the  latter  is  not  also 
borrowed.  But  he  does  not  remain  normal  for  long, 
and  he  finishes  with  this  triumphal  burst  : 

Thy  birth  is  sure  celestial  birth  ; 
The  crows  as  such  in  reverence  hold 
Thee,  Cuckoo  dear,  though  wicked  most 
They  are  and  most  audacious  bold. 

1'hou  mystery-shop,  what  art  thou,  say  ; 
Why  art  thou  Spring's  companion  sweet  } 
Would  I  could  fly  with  sable  wings, 
And  be  thy  sweet  associate  meet. 

The  cuckoo  has  been  called  many  things,  but  never 
before  a  mystery-shop. 

70 


AN  INDIAN  BARD 

A  long  elegy  on  his  wife  contains  much  genuine 
feeling.  Sometimes  the  tropes  seem  very  odd  in 
English  : 

My  eyes  responded  to  her  eyes. 
Four  rivers  flowed  their  rapid  course, 
And  when  they  dried  I  asked  her  why 
Her  rivers  flov^ed  with  immense  force. 

But  in  places  the  language  becomes  simple  and 
straightforward  imder  the  stress  of  emotion,  and 
some  of  the  stanzas  remain  affecting  in  English, 
such  as  : 

O  God  !  I  do  not  Houris  want 
To  comfort  me  in  Paradise. 
Give  me  my  purest  Sara  there  ; 
How  splendid  were  my  Sarah's  eyes. 

These  simple  passages,  however,  do  not  occur  in 
the  political  and  ceremonial  poems,  where  rhetoric 
and  ornament  are  deemed  suitable,  and  are  freely 
employed  with  astonishing  results.  The  poet  was  a 
strong  supporter  of  the  British  connection.  He  told 
his  fellow-countrymen  : 

On  England's  icy  bosom  dear 
Your  sleepless,  restless  heads  ye  lay 

—  as  if  they  were  champagne.  In  a  Jubilee  ode  to 
Queen  Victoria  he  expands  this  theme,  and  con- 
trasts the  British  raj  with  the  despotism  of  Russia 
and  "  the  hideous  hand  of  Polish  bear  "  : 

71 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

Thou  dost  not  choke  our  voice,  our  Empress  dear 
Thou  dost  not  smother  free  thought's  babes  at  all 
We  full  enjoy  our  Religion's  soothing  balm, 
And  with  thy  fetters,  us,  thou  dost  not  gall. 

The  best  of  the  many  priceless  pearls  is  probably 
the  "  Ode  to  Abul  Munsur  Iskandar  AU,  Son  of  the 
Hon'ble  Mr.  Ameer  Ali,  Judge  of  the  High  Court, 
Calcutta."  It  begins  : 

Rise  sacred  Music  and  sing  a  song 
Of  noble  and  of  glorious  birth 
Of  Mr.  Ameer  Ali's  child, 
The  brightest  jewel  on  the  earth. 

It  certainly  must  have  been  a  remarkable  child,  for : 

Sweet  child  !  thy  father's  image  high, 
Thou  art  thy  mother's  image  too. 

This  was  a  pretty  good  feat  to  start  a  career  with, 
unless  his  parents  strongly  resembled  each  other. 

It  is  no  good  my  recommending  this  book  to 
readers,  as  I  do  not  think  there  is  the  slightest  chance 
of  any  reader  being  able  to  obtain  it,  with  whatever 
effort.  And,  unfortunately,  I  cannot  quote  the  whole 
of  it.  I  can  only  make  one  more  extract.  It  comes 
from  a  romantic  night  piece  in  which  the  author 
saw  a  flock  of  strange  singing  birds,  one  of  which 
came  down,  "  and  on  my  chest  its  feathers  spread." 
All  Nature  was  peaceful  ;    every  prospect  pleased  : 

It  was  the  month  of  Ashshin  sweet. 
And  Ganges  was  full  to  the  brim. 
The  gentle  breeze  was  blowing  nice. 
And  Nature's  face  was  without  grime. 

72 


AN  INDIAN  BARD 

It  is  a  pity  that  nobody  can  compile  an  anthology  of 
such  masterpieces.  Nobody  can,  because  the  authors' 
permission  would  be  required  where  works  are  still 
in  copyright,  and  it  would  be  impossible  to  explain 
to  them  (or,  honourably,  to  conceal  from  them)  the 
object  with  which  the  collection  was  being  made. 


73 


A  TRICK  OF  MEMORY 

I  MADE  a  slip  and  blush  to  find  it  fame.  A  fort- 
night ago  I  happened  to  be  writing  about  an 
Indian  poem  on  the  cuckoo.  In  parenthesis  I 
referred  to  the  well-known  poem  beginning  : 

Bird  of  the  wilderness 
Blithesome  and  cumberless, 

and  said,  unthinkingly,  that  it  was  an  apostrophe 
to  the  cuckoo.  It  was  really  addressed  to  the 
skylark.  Needless  to  say,  an  admirer  of  the  poem 
popped  up  with  a  letter  to  the  editor  denouncing 
me  as  an  ignoramus.  I'm  not  quite  sure  that  it  was 
my  lapsus  calami  which  chiefly  annoyed  this  cor- 
respondent. What  he  really  disliked  was  the  fact 
that  I  had  laid  rude  hands  on  one  of  his  favourite 
poems.  Of  this  I  do  not  repent.  I  admire  the  author 
of  the  poem,  and  I  admire  parts  of  the  poem  itself. 
But  "  cumberless  "  appears  to  me  a  very  cumber- 
some word  ;  a  word  even  more  inappropriate  to  the 
lark  than  to  the  cuckoo.  I  don't  mind  betting  that 
had  I  or  any  poor  contemporary  addressed  the  lark 
as  "  cumberless  "  not  one  person  but  a  hundred 
people  would  write  letters  of  criticism  couched  in 
the  harshest  terms.  1  maintain  that  "  blithesome 
and  cumberless  "  is  an  abominable  line.  But  in  so 
doing  I  am  not  attempting  to  draw  a  red  herring 
across  the  main  trail,  or  to  lead  readers  into  the 
delusion  that  I  have  answered  the  charge  levelled 
against  me  of  having  stated  that  the  bird  in  that 
poem  was  a  cuckoo.  The  bird  was  not  a  cuckoo.  It 

74 


A  TRICK  OF  MEMORY 

was  a  lark.  I  said  it  was  a  cuckoo.  I  was  a  cuckoo  for 
saying  it.  I  noticed  the  error  when  too  late.  I  went 
red  in  the  face  when  the  mistake  was  exposed  by 
that  irate  correspondent.  And  I  went  red  all  over 
when  it  was  given  a  still  wider  publicity,  put  in  the 
pillory  and  exposed  to  the  eggs  and  carrots  of  the 
world,  by  Punch. 

However,  I  shall  survive.  I  do  not  take  lapses  of 
the  pen,  the  tongue,  or  the  memory,  very  seriously. 
I  should  not  like  to  pepper  every  page  I  ever  write 
with  errors  of  fact.  But  I  am  resigned  to  their  occa- 
sional occurrence,  and  I  am  as  charitable  to  them  in 
others  as  I  wish  others  to  be  when  I  make  them 
myself.  There  are  errors  and  errors.  If  I  stated 
boldly  that  "  Hamlet  "  was  written  in  prose  and  in 
bad  prose,  it  would  be  obvious  either  that  my  mind 
had  so  weakened  that  I  ought  to  post  straight  off  to 
Harley  Street,  or  else  that  I  had  never  read  the  play 
but  was  pretending  to  have  read  it.  A  Scotch  paper 
once  perpetrated  a  sentence  which  was  stuffed  full 
of  the  sort  of  errors  which  really  do  deserve  con- 
demnation and  should  permanently  disfranchise 
their  perpetrators  in  the  critical  sphere.  It  was  re- 
viewing a  Selection  from  the  poems  of  Francis 
Thompson,  and  said  : 

We  do  not  think  that  any  selection  from  the 
work  of  the  Author  of  the  "  Seasons  "  can  be 
considered  really  representative  which  contains 
no  extracts  from  his  best-known  poem,  "  The 
City  of  Dreadful  Night." 

Had  I  w  ritten  that  and  been  exposed  I  really  should 
hide    a    head    not    ordinarily    "  diminished,"    but 

75 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

shrunken  to  the  size  of  a  hazel-nut.  But  surely, 
surely,  my  poor  error  was  not  of  that  kind  ?  Surely 
1  may  advance,  and  with  more  cogency  than  she 
could,  the  defence  of  the  maid-servant  in  "  Mid- 
shipman Easy  "  that  her  offspring  was  "  only  a  very 
little  one  "  ?  And  above  all  it  was  on  the  subject  of 
the  cuckoo,  the  bird  of  mocking,  the  feathered  leg- 
puller,  whose  note  in  our  Ehzabethan  literature  is 
always  an  ironic  echo,  the  bird  which  evoked  what 
perhaps  was  the  most  masterful  definition  in  our 
language.  I  am  in  the  company  of  the  unfortunate 
wight  who,  quite  without  meaning  it,  said  that  "  the 
cuckoo  is  a  bird  which  does  not  lay  its  own  eggs." 
And  I  am  in  a  larger  company  than  that.  I  do  not 
know  that  I  ever  heard  a  story  about  a  cuckoo,  a 
story  in  which  the  word  "  cuckoo  "  occurred,  the 
point  of  which  was  not  some  ridiculous  blunder. 
There  is,  for  example,  the  story  (there  always  is) 
about  the  curate.  He  was  invited  to  an  immense 
house-party  at  a  duchess's.  At  tea  on  the  afternoon 
of  his  arrival  he  did  not  speak  ;  his  nervousness 
was  painfully  evident.  Nor  did  he  speak  during  the 
interval  between  tea  and  dinner.  Nor  during  dinner 
could  the  assistance  of  two  charming  neighbours 
and  the  auxiliary  resources  of  his  anxious  hostess 
produce  from  him  anything  but  blushes  and  nervous 
tremblings.  When  the  meal  was  over  the  ladies 
prolonged  their  stay  for  the  sake  of  helping  him  to 
start.  At  last  hope  was  given  up  ;  but  just  as  the 
hostess  was  rising  his  mouth  was  observed  to  be 
shaping  itself  towards  some  end,  and  there  was  a  hasty 
resettlement.  All  Hstened  anxiously,  endeavouring 
to  mask  their    painfully   solicitous    concentration. 

76 


A  TRICK  OF  MEMORY 

At  last  he  broke  the  silence.  "  The  c-c-cuckoo," 
he  said,  "  is  a  m-much  larger  bird  than  you  would 
s-s-suppose."  There  is  also  the  story  of  the  tearful 
child  who  brought  back  the  cuckoo  clock  with  the 
bitter  complaint  that  it  ood  before  it  cucked. 

I  made  a  mistake.  But  the  wind  that  blew  in  was 
not  altogether  evil  in  its  effects.  For  I  have  finished 
considerably  less  ignorant  than  I  started.  Not  about 
poetry,  but  about  cuckoos.  For  in  the  course  of  com- 
posing this  explanation  I  resorted  to  the  dictionaries, 
and  dictionaries  always  leave  one  richer.  I  began 
with  all  the  foreign  names  of  the  cuckoo — coucou, 
kokkux,  cu cuius,  kokild,  kuckuk,  koekoek.  I  then 
learnt  (though  this  I  fear  I  shall  not  retain)  that  the 
Cuculidae  are  zygodactyl  and  desmognathous.  But 
then  I  came  to  the  slang  definition  :  "  a  fool,"  "  a 
gowk."  It  suddenly  occurred  to  me  :  if  I  look  up 
"  gowk  "  shall  I  simply  see  "  a  cuckoo,"  "  a  fool  "  ? 
So  I  looked  up  "  gowk,"  and  found  to  my  intense 
astonishment  that  it  originally  actually  meant  a 
cuckoo,  being  derived  from  the  Icelandic  name  for 
the  bird.  How  many  people  who  call  other  people 
gowks  know  that  they  are  caUing  them  cuckoos  ? 
This  is  a  fact  worth  making  mistakes  for.  The  rest 
are  not  quite  so  thrilling,  and  I  have  no  space  to 
tabulate  them  all.  But  it  is  something  to  have  started, 
or  added  to,  one's  store  of  erudition  concerning  the 
cuckoo-bee,  the  cuckoo-falcon,  the  cuckoo-fly,  the 
cuckoo-shrike,  cuckoo-spit  (also  known  as  toad- 
spittle  and  frog-spit).  I  turn  the  page  and  come  to 
cucumber  mildew  and  the  cucumber  flea  beetle. 
Good-bye,  I  am  going  to  spend  the  evening  with 
the  letter  "  C." 

77 


PRIZE  POEMS 

PEOPLE  may  often  be  heard  saying  that  no 
poet  of  any  merit,  and  no  poem  of  any  merit, 
was  ever  known  to  win  the  Newdigate  at 
Oxford  or  the  Chancellor's  Medal  at  Cambridge. 
This  is  not  precisely  true  ;  it  wants  as  much  quali- 
fication as  that  other  common  generaUsation  which 
has  it  that  Senior  Wranglers  "  never  do  anything  in 
after  life."  It  is  true  that  these  contests  do  not  greatly 
excite  good  poets,  and  that  the  examiners  do  not 
always  know  a  good  poet  when  they  see  one.  Rupert 
Brooke  was  defeated  on  the  solitary  occasion  in 
which  he  entered  for  the  Cambridge  bays,  and 
Swinburne  failed  to  carry  off  the  Newdigate  with 
his  eloquent  periods  on  the  last  voyage  of  Sir  John 
Franklin.  Yet  a  fair  number  of  the  eminent  literary 
men  who  passed  through  Oxford  and  Cambridge 
during  the  nineteenth  century  entered  and  won. 
Matthew  Arnold  carried  off  the  Newdigate  with  a 
poem  on  "  Cromwell,"  and  Oscar  Wilde  won  with 
his  "  Ravenna  "  ;  and  at  Cambridge  the  early  prize- 
men included  Tennyson,  Praed  and  Lord  Lytton, 
not  to  mention  persons  (such  as,  in  our  own  time, 
Professor  Pigou  and  Mr.  Lytton  Strachey)  whose 
later  works  have  not  been  classifiable  as  imaginative 
literature. 

And,  as  I  remarked,  the  poems  themselves  are 
not  always  bad.  Only  one  line  from  a  Prize  poem 
has  become  a  common  quotation,  namely,  Dean 
Burgon's  (Oxford)  description  of  Petra  as  : 

A  rose-red  city  half  as  old  as  time. 

78 


PRIZE  POEMS 

But  there  are  a  fair  number  of  whole  poems  which 
can  still  be  read  ^^ithout  tedium,  much  less  nausea. 
I  will  not  go  so  far  as  to  say  that  Praed's  "  Austral- 
asia "  (of  which  I  am  happy  to  possess  a  Senate 
House  Copy,  1823)  was  a  masterpiece,  but  there 
was  genuine  feeling  in  it.  The  associations  of  names 
change.  Australasia  to  the  young  Praed  was  merely 
a  place  to  which  convicts  were  transported,  and  the 
sufferings  of  these  unfortunates  led  him  to  sincere 
but  highly  stilted  passages  in  the  vein  of  : 

The  hapless  female  stands  in  silence  there, 
So  weak  and  wan,  and  yet  so  sadly  fair, 
That  those  who  gaze,  a  rude  untutored  tribe, 
Check  the  coarse  question,  and  the  wounding  gibe. 

Six  years  later,  Alfred  Tennyson,  of  Trinity,  won 
with  a  poem  on  "  Timbuctoo,"  which  is  at  once  a 
model  example  of  how  the  set  subject  should  be 
taken  and  a  splendid  proof  that  not  all  examiners 
arc  dolts.  The  poem  is  reputed  to  have  been  a  re- 
furbishment of  an  old  one  on  a  totally  different 
subject.  It  is  quite  easy  to  believe  this,  the  one  direct 
mention  of  Timbuctoo  occurring  thus  : 

Then  1  rais'd 
My  voice  and  cried  "  Wide  Afric,  doth  thy  Sun 
Lighten,  thy  hills  enfold  a  City  as  fair 
As  those  which  starr'd  the  night  o'  the  Elder 

World  ? 
Or  is  the  rumour  of  thy  Timbuctoo 
A  dream  as  frail  as  those  of  ancient  I'ime  ? 

79 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

It  is  a  terribly  obscure  poem,  but  it  contains  magnijfi- 
cent  things.  The  contrast  between  Tennyson's 
blank  verse  and  the  Augustan  couplets  which  had 
won  six  years  earlier  is  remarkable  and  significant 
of  the  transition  through  which  our  poetry  had  just 
passed.  Another  remarkable  thing  about  Tenny- 
son's success  is  that  an  outside  critic  noticed  the 
poem  and  saw  what  Tennyson  was  going  to  become. 
"  Timbuctoo,"  said  the  Athenceum  on  July  22nd, 
1829,  was  the  work  of  a  really  first-rate  poetical 
genius: 

We  have  accustomed  ourselves  to  think,  per- 
haps without  any  very  good  reason,  that  poetry 
was  likely  to  perish  among  us  for  a  considerable 
period  after  the  great  generation  of  poets  which 
is  now  passing  away.  The  age  seems  determined 
to  contradict  us,  and  that  in  the  most  decided 
manner  ;  for  it  has  put  forth  poetry  by  a  young 
man,  and  that  where  we  should  least  expect  it — 
namely,  in  a  prize  poem. 

Tennyson's  composition,  said  his  critic,  would  have 
done  honour  to  any  man  who  ever  wrote. 

The  poets  have  done  as  well  as  could  be  expected. 
But  the  general  dulness,  unoriginality,  even  absurd- 
ity, of  the  subjects  set  for  the  University  Prize  Poems 
cannot  well  be  exaggerated.  I  have  forgotten  what 
was  the  subject  set  at  Cambridge  just  before  the  war 
which  was  so  preposterous  that  for  the  first  time  on 
record  not  a  single  undergraduate  submitted  any 
verses,  but  I  remember  that  shortly  before  my  own 
time  the  poets  of  the  University  were  asked  to  write 
on  "  The  Coronation  of  King  Edward  the  Seventh 

80 


PRIZE  POEMS 

and  King  Edward  the  Confessor."  This  was  a  merely 
manufactured  subject.  I  can  conceive  the  unhappy 
aspirants  setting  to  work  with  Hsts  of  comparisons 
and  contrasts  :  as  "  Resemblance  :  both  called 
Edward,"  "  Difference  :  earlier  Edward  wore  hair 
shirt,  later  Edward  did  not."  Often  enough  the  sub- 
jects, whilst  quite  reasonably  likely  to  inspire  poets, 
are  unfair  as  putting  too  great  a  premium  on  local 
knowledge  of  fact.  It  is  all  very  well  to  set  "  Tibet  " 
(as  was  once  done),  for  nobody  will  have  been  there 
and  fancy  can  run  free.  But  a  year  before  "  Tibet  " 
was  set  the  subject  was  "  Durham  " — one  of  scores 
of  towns  which  have  been  set  at  Oxford  and  Cam- 
bridge. How  well  I  remember  my  first  and  only 
attempt  to  begin  a  poem  for  that  comic  competition. 
I  had  never  been  to  Durham.  I  knew  that  the  great 
points  about  it  were  the  picturesqueness  of  its  site 
and  the  hoary  age  of  its  cathedral.  The  first  thing  I 
did  was  to  go  to  reference  books,  which  told  me  that 
St.  Somebody  was  there  in  700,  and  that  a  rough 
wicker-work  church  was  built  on  the  site  of  the 
present,  etc.,  etc.,  in  800.  This  didn't  do  ;  I  got  a 
photograph  and  let  my  imagination  go.  But  what 
was  the  good  of  that  ?  Adjectives  began  pouring  in 
all  over  the  place.  Yet  I  did  not  really  know  whether 
the  roofs  in  Durham  were  red  or  blue,  whether  the 
houses  were  grey  stone  or  red  brick  ;  whether  in- 
dustrial smoke  covered  the  town,  whether  it  roared 
with  machinery  or  was  wrapped  in  a  quiet,  like 
that  of  Bruges-la- JNIorte.  I  knew  that  mistakes  in  fact 
about  an  accessible  English  town  would  dish  me  at 
once.  I  did  not  feel  incUned  to  pay  for  a  return  ticket 
to  Durham  on  the  off-chance  of  getting  a  five-ounce 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

gold  medal  ;  so  I  gave  it  up.  Had  the  favoured 
borough  been  Exeter  or  Truro  I  should  have  been 
all  over  it  at  once,  and  the  North-countrymen  would 
have  been  the  sufferers. 

What  on  earth  made  me  begin  this  .'*  It  is  all 
right  ;  but  why  now  ?  Well,  1  have  just  been  told 
the  subject  set  at  Cambridge  this  year,  and  it  seems 
to  me  a  good  one.  It  is  occasional,  and  in  the  tradition, 
but  it  happens  to  be  a  theme  which  might  well  cap- 
ture and  fire  a  young  man  who  began  toying  with  it 
in  even  the  most  cold-blooded  way.  It  is  just  a 
hundred  years  since  the  death  of  Napoleon,  and 
the  Death  of  Napoleon  is  the  subject  set  for  the 
Chancellor's  Medal.  Something  more  than  the 
ordinary  neat  elegiac  verses  may  come  out  of  this  if 
there  happens  to  be  in  Cambridge  at  the  mom.ent 
an  undergraduate  of  the  young  Tennyson's  quality. 
I  don't  mean  we  should  expect  a  great  poem.  People 
do  not  usually  write  such  things  when  very  young 
and  they  do  not  write  them  to  order.  But  the  sub- 
ject is  one  which,  examiners  or  no  examiners,  must 
already  have  sometimes  enforced  the  attention  of 
almost  any  imaginative  young  man  with  a  capacity 
for  thought.  Napoleon  is  an  obvious  symbol  for  all 
the  powerful  and  transient  things  in  life  ;  career 
and  end  are  intenselj'^  dramatic  ;  and  as  for  the 
"  setting,"  a  poet  describing  "  the  last  phase  "  has 
half  his  work  done  for  him  before  he  begins  to  write. 
An  undergraduate  with  brains,  feelings  and  a  natural 
capacity  for  the  best  kind  of  metrical  rhetoric  may 
— to  put  it  no  higher— do  a  fine  tour-de-force  on 
this  subject,  and  I  look  forward  to  the  result  with 
curiosity. 

82 


BURTON'S  ANATOMY 

I  HAVEN'T  noticed  anybody  celebrating,  but 
this  1 92 1  happens  to  be  the  tercentenary  year 
of  the  pubhcation  of  Burton's  Anatomy,  a 
book  which  Sterne  stole  from,  which  Dr.  Johnson 
revered,  and  which  Lamb  finally  established  in  its 
rightful  high  place  in  our  literature.  Its  author,  a 
wrinkled  and  bearded  don  of  Christ  Church  (and 
a  clergyman),  wTote  nothing  else  but  a  Latin 
comedy.  "  The  Anatomy  "  was  his  hfe-work  ;  the 
amount  of  reading  and  note-making  he  did  for  it 
must  have  been  vast.  What  people  who  haven't  read 
it  thmk  It  is  like  1  cannot  conceive  ;  but  they  can- 
not possibly  have  any  accurate  notion.  Nobody 
would  expect,  with  such  a  title,  to  find  an  enormous 
tome,  wherein  melancholy,  it  is  true,  is  anatomised, 
and  much  play  made  with  humours,  fluxions,  and 
bile,  but  in  w^hich  there  are  thousands  of  the  queerest 
and  most  amusing  anecdotes  and  short  stories  in 
the  world.  Consecutive  reading  is  unnecessary. 
Pick  it  up  anwyhere,  and  begin  even  in  the  middle 
of  any  chapter  ;  you  may  read  on  and  you  will  be 
entertained  and  informed. 

I  doubt  if  many  men  have  read  it  through.  The 
one  part  to  read  through  is  the  most  famous,  and  it 
must  be  agreed  the  most  amusing,  section  of  the 
book,  the  preface,  "  Democritus  to  the  Reader." 
The  book  on  the  title-page  is  ascribed  to  Democritus, 
Junior  (D.  being,  you  will  remember,  the  laughing 
philosopher),  and  the  author  professes  to  be  strictly 
anonymous.  "  Seek  not  after  that  which  is  hid,"  he 

83 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

remarks,  "  if  the  contents  please  thee,  and  be  for 
thy  use,  suppose  the  Man  in  the  Moon,  or  whom 
thou  wilt,  to  be  the  author,  I  would  not  willingly  be 
known  " — this  being  oddly  coupled,  in  the  first 
edition,  with  the  signature,  "  From  my  Studie  in 
Christ  Church,  Oxon.,  December  5th,  1620.  Robert 
Burton."  The  address  of  the  young  Democritus  is 
the  most  extraordinary  compost  of  waggery,  shrewd- 
ness, whimsicality,  fantastic  learning,  originality 
and  "  scissors  and  paste  "  in  the  language.  Any 
good  thing  that  he  found  in  a  classical  author  he 
would  make  relevant  someho\^,  and  he  had  the 
delightful  habit  of  accompanying  most  of  his  quota- 
tions with  pithy  and  full-flavoured  translations.  I 
will  quote  a  few  sentences  from  this  preface. 

Here  we   have   one   which   contains   the   I'ruth 
about  Advertising  : 

Howsoever,  it  is  a  kind  of  poHcy  in  these  dayes 
to  prefix  a  phantastical  title  to  a  book  which  is  to 
be  sold  :  for  as  larks  come  down  to  a  day-net, 
many  vain  readers  will  tarry  and  stand  gazing, 
like  silly  passengers  at  an  antick  picture  in  a 
painter's  shop,  that  will  not  look  on  a  judicious 
piece.  .  .  . 

.  .  .  Many  men,  saith  GelUus,  are  very  con- 
ceited in  their  inscriptions,  and  able  (as  Pliny 
quotes  out  of  Seneca)  to  make  him  loyter  by  the 
way,  that  went  in  haste  to  fetch  a  mid-wife  for 
his  daughter,  now  ready  to  lye  down. 

You  can't  put  it  more  strongly  than  that  !  Most  of 
his  good  things  bristle  thus  with  the  names  of  the 

84 


BURTON'S  ANATOMY 

ancients  ;  yet  his  mere  choice,  and  the  wording  of 
his  versions,  communicate  powerfully  the  colour 
of  his  personality.  "  To  be  busied  in  toyes  is  to 
small  purpose,  yet  hear  that  divine  Seneca,  better 
aliud  agere  quam  nihil."  "  To  this  end  I  write,  like 
them,  saith  Lucian,  that  recite  to  trees  and  declaim 
to  pillars,  for  want  to  auditors."  "  So  that  often- 
times, it  falls  out  (which  Callimachus  taxed  of  old) 
that  a  great  book  is  a  great  mischiefe."  "  Though 
there  were  many  gyants  of  old  in  physick  and  phil- 
osophy, yet  I  say  with  Didacus  Stella,  '  A  dwarf 
standing  on  the  shoulders  of  a  gyant,  may  see  farther 
than  a  gyant  himself.'  "  Thus  all  the  names  in 
Lempri^re  are  tumbled  out.  But  Burton  knew  what 
he  was  doing.  It  was,  perhaps,  a  little  cool  of  him  to 
accuse  other  men  of  larding  "  their  lean  books  with 
the  fat  of  other's  workes,"  and  to  ask,  "  If  that  severe 
doom  of  Synesius  be  true  it  is  a  greater  offence  to 
steal  dead  men's  labours  than  their  cloaths,  what 
shall  become  of  most  writers  .''  "  But  perhaps  he 
said  this  to  annoy  the  dullards.  For  his  own  books, 
though  larded  with  the  fat  of  others,  had  fat  of  their 
own  ;  and  the  greatest  of  English  patchwork-makers 
was  no  plagiarist. 

He  preferred,  it  pleased  his  odd  taste,  to  back  up 
the  most  straightforward  of  his  own  reflections  with 
a  quotation  from  some  recondite  dead  man.  "  But 
as  Baronius  hath  it  of  Cardinal  Caraffa's  workes,  he 
is  a  meer  hog  that  rejects  any  man  for  his  poverty." 
His  own  attitude  comes  through  clearly  enough. 
He  had  not  written  a  religious  work.  He  admitted 
that  divinity  was  the  queen  of  professions,  but 
"  there  be  so  many  books  in  that  kinde,  so  many 

85 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

commentators,  treatises,  pamphlets,  expositions, 
sermons,  that  whole  teems  of  oxen  cannot  draw 
them."  But  a  good  deal  of  his  religion  comes  out, 
and  his  opinions  on  social  matters  are  interesting 
and  enlightened.  He  drew  the  picture  of  an  ideal 
state,  where  murder  and  adultery  would  he  pun- 
ished by  death,  but  not  theft  ;  for  he  had  no  worship 
of  property.  Here  are  a  few  of  his  sentences  on  such 
matters  : 

To  see  a  man  wear  his  brains  in  his  belly,  his 
guts  in  his  head,  an  hundred  oaks  on  his  back, 
to  devour  an  hundred  oxen  at  a  meale  ;  nay,  more, 
to  devour  houses  and  towns,  or,  as  those  anthro- 
pophagi, to  eat  one  another.  .  .  . 

Wrangling  lawyers  who  .  .  .  are  so  litigious 
and  busie  here  on  earth,  that  I  think  they  will 
plead  their  clients'  cases  hereafter,  some  of  them 
in  hell. 

[In  his  imaginary  state]  hospitals  of  all  kindes, 
for  children,  orphans,  old  folkes,  sick  men,  mad 
men,  souldiers — pest-houses  (not  built  precorio, 
or  by  gowty  benefactors  who,  when  by  fraud  and 
rapine  they  have  extorted  all  their  lives,  oppressed 
whole  provinces,  societies,  etc.,  give  something 
to  pious  uses,  build  a  satisfactory  alms-house, 
school,  or  bridge,  etc.,  at  their  last  end,  or  before 
perhaps  ;  which  is  no  otherwise  than  to  steal  a 
goose,  and  stick  down  a  feather,  rob  a  thousand 
to  relieve  one). 

He  was  anti-militarist,  and  he  touched  on  the  problem 
of  unemployment.  But  one  of  the  most  interesting 

86 


BURTON'S  ANATOMY 

of  his  political  sentences  leads  nowhere  :  "I  have 
read  a  discourse  printed  anno  1612,  discovering  the 
true  causes  why  Ireland  was  never  intirely  subdued, 
or  brought  under  obedience  to  the  crowne  of 
England,  until  the  beginning  of  his  Majestic 's  happy 
reign  ! 

The  "  Anatomy  "  first  appeared  as  a  quarto  ; 
the  well-known  folios  came  later.  It  was  successful 
from  the  first,  and  according  to  Anthony  a  Wood 
the  bookseller  got  an  estate  out  of  it.  Le  Blon's  cele- 
brated and  beautiful  title  page  first  appeared  in  the 
third  edition,  accompanied  by  a  note  from  the  author 
saying  that  he  would  revise  no  more.  But  the  maggots 
in  a  head  like  that  are  not  so  easily  quieted.  The 
revisions  proceeded,  and  even  the  sixth  (posthu- 
mous) edition  contained  corrections  which  the 
author  left  behind  in  manuscript.  Sir  Charles 
Whibley,  in  his  recent  delightful  book,  "  Literary 
Portraits,"  has  an  interesting  note  on  the  book. 
"  '  How  comes  it,'  asked  Mr.  Bullen  in  1893,  'that 
the  Editio  Princeps  of  the  "  Anatomy  "  is  not  in 
Christ  Church  library  ?  '  There  is  one  excellent 
reason  :  the  copy,  which  Burton  presented  to  the 
most  flourishing  college  in  Europe,  is  now  in  the 
British  Museum.  The  inscription  on  the  back  of 
the  title  page  is  unmistakable  :  Ex  dono  Roherti 
Burto?i  aedis  hujusce  alumni.  But  how  it  escaped 
from  Oxford  to  London  is  unexplained."  Possibly, 
during  some  era  when  early  quartos  were  under- 
rated, it  may  have  been  sold  as  not  being  the  best 
edition !  I  seem  to  remember  that  the  Bodleian  copy 
(now  back  at  Bodley's)  of  the  First  Shakespeare 
Folio  went  similarly  astray. 

87 


A  VETERINARY  SURGEON 

IT  is  often  observed  that  there  have  been  ages 
when  many  EngUshmen  wrote  first-class,  and 
most  EngHshmen  could  write  interesting,  prose. 
The  marks  of  our  Elizabethan  and  Caroline  styles 
are  not  easy  to  define.  There  was  a  universal  move- 
ment of  speech  just  as  there  is  a  prevalent  tone  in 
our  folk-songs.  But  there  was  more  than  that.  The 
style  was  the  man,  or,  rather,  the  nation.  The  habit 
was  to  call  things  what  they  were,  to  put  on  paper 
what  you  saw  and  thought  as  you  saw  and  thought 
it.  And  specialisation  had  not  set  in.  A  metaphor 
was  not  considered  a  waste  of  space  in  a  "  dry  " 
book  ;  personality  was  nowhere  excluded  ;  even 
State  papers  were  written  vividly  and  racily.  To- 
day every  book,  as  it  were,  bears  a  label  :  "  This 
book  is  intended  to  contain  good  prose,"  or  "  this 
book  is  not  intended  to  contain  good  prose." 

Now,  if  there  is  one  place  in  which  one  would  not 
look  for  good,  muscular,  amusing  English  that 
place,  I  should  say,  is  a  modern  medical  treatise, 
and,  above  all,  a  treatise  on  veterinary  surgery. 
"  Diseases  of  the  Cow,"  "  Some  Observations  on 
Swine-Fever,"  "  Ovine  Obstetrics,"  "  Notes  on 
Farcy,  Glanders,  Epizootic  Lymphangitis  and 
Anthrax  "  :  confess,  reader,  that  when  you  see 
such  titles  as  those  on  a  row  of  books  in  a  friend's 
library,  you  never  think  of  making  a  closer  acquaint- 
ance with  their  authors.  Yet,  time  was  when  veter- 
inary science,  like  military  science  and  every  other 
science,  was  in  close  contact  with  the  humanities, 


A  VETERINARY  SURGEON 

and  when  it  was  not  considered  strange  that  an 
expert  writer  on  farriery  should  use  the  tropes  of  a 
poet  and  the  periods  of  a  pulpiteer  and  delight  in 
the  exercise  of  that  faculty  for  good  speech  with 
which  God  had  endowed  him.  I  have  just  been 
reading  a  work  bv  such  a  man.  It  was  published  as 
late  as  1687  by  J.  Hindmarsh,  at  the  Golden  Ball, 
against  the  Royal  Exchange  in  Cornhill.  Its  author 
was  Andrew  Snape,  Junior  Farrier  to  His  Majesty. 
And  its  title  is  (I  give  it  in  its  picturesque  fullness), 
"  The  Anatomy  of  a  Horse,  containing  An  exact 
and  full  Description  of  the  Frame,  Situation,  and 
Connexion  of  all  his  Parts  (with  their  Actions  and 
Uses)  exprest  in  Forty-nine  Copper-Plates.  To 
w^hich  is  Added  An  Appendix  containing  two  Dis- 
courses :  the  one,  the  Generation  of  Animals  ; 
And  the  other,  of  the  Motion  of  the  Chyle,  and  the 
Circulation  of  the  Bloud." 

That  was  Snape's  subject  ;  and  his  manner  of 
writing  was  sometimes  that  of  the  curious  Coryat  or 
the  waggish  Fuller,  and  sometimes  reminds  one  of 
the  eloquent  Taylor  or  Sir  Thomas  Browne.  He 
knew  his  job.  He  was  a  practical  man  if  ever  there 
was  one  :  his  accounts  are  clear  and  first  hand,  his 
plates  look  so  good  that  I  imagine  them  to  be  still 
valid.  But  he  had  time  for  reflection,  and  he  saw 
the  horse  as  part  of  the  Universal  Order.  You  get  a 
flavour  of  his  sententious  charm  in  the  introduction  : 

Now,  order  of  dissection  requires  that  you 
should  first  begin  with  the  Head,  it  being  the 
most  mobile  and  excellent  part  ;  next  that  of  the 
Chest,  and  lastly  the  Belly  :    but  this  (as  I  have 

89 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

said)  is  not  to  be  done  where  there  is  but  one  body, 
for  there  you  must  begin  with  those  parts  that  are 
most  subject  to  Corruption,  wherefor  you  must 
first  cut  up  the  Lower  Belly,  then  the  Chest,  and 
lastly  the  Head  ;  both  which  ways  are  often  used, 
the  first  being  called  the  way  of  dignity,  and  the 
other  of  diuturnity  ;  the  one  being  more  noble, 
and  the  other  of  a  longer  durance. 

And  it  was  quite  natural  to  him  to  begin  his  book 
proper  with  a  commendation  of  the  horse.  "  Before 
I  take  in  pieces  this  Goodly  Creature,  It  will  not  be 
amiss  if  I  just  give  you  an  account  of  all  these  Parts 
as  they  lie  in  order,  beginning  with  that  which  first 
appeareth  to  our  View,  and  that  is  the  Scarf-skin 
adorned  with  hairs,  wherein  (as  a  Case)  Nature  hath 
wrapped  this  stately  beast." 

I  never  thought  I  should  spend  half-a-day  read- 
ing about  the  nerves  and  muscles,  the  livers  and 
midriffs  of  the  horse.  I  love  this  goodly  creature.  I 
have  even  been  known  to  mount  this  stately  beast 
and,  on  occasion,  he  hath  caused  me  to  fall.  But  his 
interior  has  never  greatly  aroused  my  curiosity.  It 
has  taken  Andrew  Snape  to  do  that,  and  I  could  read 
Andrew  Snape  on  anything.  Hear  the  Royal  Farrier 
on  the  horse's  hair  : 

And  hence  may  be  gathered  a  reason  of  the 
shedding  of  the  hair,  which  is  observed  to  happen 
in  many  Horses  that  have  ill  keeping,  such  as 
your  Cart-horses  that  seldom  have  any  labour 
bestowjsd  upon  them,  for  want  of  which  dressing 
to  remove  the  dust  which  lieth  upon  the  mouths 
of  the  pores  or  at  the  roots  of  the  hairs,  the 

90 


A  VETERINARY  SURGEON 

passages,  through  which  the  juice  should  come 
that  nourishes  the  hair,  are  obstructed  or  stopped, 
and  so  Hke  dead  Leaves  from  a  Tree  in  Autumn 
they  drop  off,  or  as  untimely  Fruit  falls  before 
the  season  of  the  year  requireth  it. 

If  the  cholerick  humour  doth  most  predominate, 
then  are  the  hairs  of  a  black,  or  sorrel  or  a  chest- 
nut colour  ;  If  bloud  most  predominate,  then 
will  the  Horse  be  a  bright  Bay  or  Roan  ;  If 
flegme,  then  the  Horse  will  be  of  a  milk-white  or 
yellow-dun  ;  If  melancholy,  then  will  the  Horse  be 
of  an  iron-gray  or  Mouse-dun.  Thus  much  for  the 
colour  of  the  hairs,  next  I  come  to  the  use  of  them. 

The  use  of  the  hairs  is,  first  to  cover  the  skin  ; 
secondly,  to  defend  it  ;  thirdly,  to  be  an  orna- 
ment to  it. 

Even  his  most  technical  pages  abound  with  these 
charming  passages,  and  on  general  topics  he  is  always 
delightful.  Take  him  on  germination  : 

The  Eggs  (or  Seeds)  of  Plants  being  excluded 
out  of  the  Egg- Bed  (called  a  Pod  or  Husk,  or  by 
whatever  other  name  distinguished)  requiring 
further  fostering  and  brooding,  are  committed 
to  the  Earth  by  the  officious  Winds  or  by  the 
industry  of  Men.  This  kind  Mother  having 
received  them  into  her  Bosom,  doth  not  only 
give  them  incubation  or  brooding  by  her  own 
halituous  vapours  joined  with  the  heat  of  the 
Sunbeams  ;  but  doth  by  degrees  abundantly  sup- 
ply what  the  fruitful  Seeds  stand  in  need  of. 

I  said  that  the  old  common  prose  was  marked  by  a 
general  inchnation  and  ability  to  call  a  spade  a  spade, 

91 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

by  a  readiness  to  use  apt  ornament  anywhere,  by  a 
music  to  which  all  men  were  accustomed.  It  gained 
much  by  the  homogeneity  of  philosophy  ;  every- 
thing was  looked  at  in  the  light  of  everything  else, 
and  God  or  the  dulcimer  may  meet  you  on  any  page 
of  a  medical  book.  But  there  is  often  something 
more- — and  even  now  I  have  not  mentioned  that 
adventitious  deliciousness  that  comes  from  the 
parade  of  "  knowledge  "  now  outworn  or  obvious. 
I  mean  the  suffusion  by  a  reverent  and  humble 
spirit,  less  common  among  writers  now  than  it  was 
in  the  seventeenth  century,  or  at  any  rate  less  easily 
disclosed.  I  can  do  no  better  than  end  with  part  of  a 
digression  that  occurs  in  the  middle  of  the  chapter 
on  the  Muscles  : 

I  hope  no  curious  and  ingenious  Anatomist, 
that  knows  how  much  time  and  pains  is  neces- 
sary to  be  spent  upon  the  exact  examination  of 
any  one  Part,  will  think  me  sluggish  and  supine, 
that  I  have  not  in  those  few  years  that  I  have 
applied  my  self  to  this  study,  attained  as  yet 
to  the  full  knowledge  of  all  the  Parts  of  this  Beast 
that  I  anatomize.  And  as  on  the  one  hand  I  hope 
I  may  myself  attain  to  greater  skill  in  this  Art  than 
I  have  yet  ever  arrived  at  ;  so  on  the  other  hand 
I  would  not  be  guilty  of  the  vanity  of  thinking  to 
monopolize  it,  but  shall  both  desire  and  hope  that 
others  will  make  up  what  I  shall  leave  imperfect. 
But  thus  much  I  hope  may  serve  for  mine  Apology 
with  all  ingenuous  Men,  I  shall  therefore  return 
from  whence  I  have  digressed. 

What  could  be  better  expressed  ? 

92 


THE  LONELY  AUTHOR 

I  HAD  left  my  friends.  I  had  rather  a  long  journey 
before  me,  and  I  thought  I  would  break  it.  Half- 
way there  was  a  cathedral  town,  a  few  miles  from 
which  is  a  house  where  I  counted  on  being  put  up 
for  the  night.  But  I  had  left  it  too  late.  A  tardy 
telegram  produced  the  reply  that  everybody  was 
away,  so  I  was  left  stranded.  "  Very  well,"  I  thought, 
"  I  will  go  to  a  hotel."  This  I  did,  but,  the  pleasures 
of  the  table  exhausted,  the  hotel  provided  no  others. 
There  was  no  biUiard  room,  and  the  guests  were  all 
of  that  sort  of  restless  and  self-centred  birds  of 
passage  with  whom  it  is  impossible  to  enter  into  con- 
versation, much  less  get  up  a  four.  When  I  had  read 
the  newspaper  cuttings  about  royal  visits  to  the 
hostelry  and  the  times  at  which  the  stage  coaches 
used  to  leave  it  for  London  in  Lord  North's  day,  I 
was  left  without  occupation.  Like  a  fool,  I  had  for- 
gotten to  get  anything  to  read,  having  not  a  single 
volume  with  me  except  the  latest  cheap  volume  of 
Tarzan  from  which  1  had  drained  the  last  drop  of 
honey — or,  should  I  say,  blood — in  the  train.  With 
my  most  insinuating  smile,  I  attempted  to  borrow 
something  from  the  lady  in  the  office.  She  had 
nothing,  but  told  me  that  the  whole  library  of  the 
hotel  was  in  the  Resident  V'^isitors'  Smoking  Lounge. 
My  spirits  rose,  and  I  went  to  that  room.  It  was  a 
very  odd  collection.  There  were  about  twenty 
volumes  in  all,  including  the  corpses  of  old  Brad- 
shaws  from  which  the  vital  spark  of  utility  had  long 
since   departed.   Even   I,   omnivorous   reader   as    I 

93 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

count  myself,  cannot  hoax  myself  into  curiosity 
about  the  time  at  which  the  fast  trains  got  to  Bristol 
in  1888.  But  the  other  volumes  were  not  much  more 
alive  to  me.  I  shut  as  soon  as  I  had  opened  the 
grimy  bound  volumes  of  the  Magazine  of  Art  ;  the 
Temple  Bar  did  not  detain  me.  The  few  novels 
were  all  books  which  I  had  read  long  since  and  did 
not  wish  to  read  again,  "  John  Hahfax,  Gentleman," 
being  the  most  notable.  There  remained  three  things 
of  some  interest.  The  first  was  an  old  green  book 
about  Enghsh  Freshwater  Fish,  the  second  an  odd 
(and  not  the  first)  volume  of  an  extremely  long  and 
tedious  analysis  of  Edmund  Spenser's  poetry,  and 
the  third  an  inscribed  copy — I  supposed  somebody 
had  left  it  there — of  a  long  political  poem  by  William 
Allingham.  Alhngham's  signature  interested  me, 
and  I  have  Uked  some  of  his  shorter  poems,  but  one 
or  two  pages  of  this  laborious  narrative  made  it 
plain  to  me  that  even  the  brown  trout,  the  chub, 
the  dace  and  the  roach  had  more  charms  for  me 
than  Allingham 's  blank  verse.  So  with  a  discontented 
sigh  I  got  my  coat  and  hat  and  went  out  into  the 
frosty  moonlit  night.  After  all,  oughtn't  a  man  of 
sensibility  to  be  content  with  a  cathedral  town  under 
the  moon  .'' 

It  certainly  was  beautiful.  There  was  no  traffic, 
and  the  few  pedestrians  slank  quietly  through  the 
shadows.  In  the  narrow  streets  the  lamps  lit  up  old 
timbered  fronts,  gables,  and  projecting  upper  stories. 
The  river,  with  a  moon  reflected  in  it,  ran  quietly 
under  the  old  stone  bridge,  overhung  by  willows 
insubstantial  in  the  moonshine.  Here  and  there  I 
had  peeps  of  the  towers  of  the  cathedral,  and  at  last 

94 


THE  LONELY  AUTHOR 

I  came  upon  the  lawns  around  it  whence  its  huge 
bulk,  shadowed  with  buttresses  and  statuary,  rose 
ghostly  to  the  sky.  But  passing  under  an  archway  I 
came  upon  a  wide  enclosed  place  of  shining  grass 
surrounded  with  long  Georgian  houses,  faintly 
porticoed  and  trellised.  Through  the  lit  yellow  blinds 
of  their  upper  windows  came,  as  I  walked,  sounds 
of  one  music  succeeding  another,  a  piano,  a  vioUn,  a 
voice.  It  was  cold  and  the  place  deserted,  and  it  was 
then  that  I  fell  to  statistics. 

For  I  was  feehng  cold  and  lonely.  It  w-as  still,  by 
my  standards,  early.  I  didn't  want  to  go  back  to  the 
faded  carpets,  the  varnish,  the  stuffiness,  the  tawdry 
sitting-room  and  bleak  bedroom  of  that  very  historic 
hotel.  I  wanted  talk  and  company,  and  in  all  that 
town  there  was  nobody  to  whom  I  had,  I  thought, 
a  right  to  speak.  But  nobody  ?  It  suddenly  occurred 
to  me  that  I  was  an  author,  an  author  of  books.  Not 
a  very  popular  author,  not  an  author  who  counts  his 
sales — much  less  his  receipts — by  tens  of  thousands  ; 
but  an  author  nevertheless  whose  works  have  to 
some  extent  penetrated  the  educated  population. 
For  the  first  time  in  my  hfe,  as  my  footsteps  rang 
again  down  an  empty  and  thrice-traversed  High 
Street,  I  made  a  computation  as  to  the  gross  total 
of  all  my  volumes  which  had  been  purchased  by 
the  public.  There  were  so  many  thousands.  The 
population  of  the  United  Kingdom  was,  say,  fifty 
millions.  Take  the  average  number  of  my  volumes 
owned  by  each  of  my  patrons  as  two,  assume  the 
population  of  that  town  to  be  twenty-five  thousand  ; 
the  deduction  was  that — and  as  it  was  a  cathedral  city, 
full  of  learned  people,  the  chances  were  nominally 

95 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

in  my  favour — in  at  least  two  or  three  houses  of 
that  town  there  existed  copies  of  my  books  bought, 
paid  for,  probably  read,  possibly  liked  by  the  in- 
habitants. But  which  houses  ? 

Here  was  I,  solitary  and  chilled.  Yet,  perhaps,  in 
the  very  house  I  was  passing,  whose  curtains  gave 
me  a  peep  of  mahogany,  old  silver  and  books,  there 
must  be  one  or  two  strangers  within  a  few  minutes 
of  me  who  might  even  be  glad  were  I  to  walk  sud- 
denly in  upon  them.  I  had  never  heard  their  names  ; 
yet  to  them,  for  such  is  the  magic  of  authorship,  to 
them  if  to  nobody  else  in  the  whole  town,  even  my 
Christian  names  were  familiar,  possibly  my  age, 
the  outlines  of  my  education,  the  development  of 
the  talents  they  were  generous  enough  to  have  per- 
ceived in  me.  I  attempted  to  picture  what  they  might 
be  hke.  I  had  glimpses  of  a  cultivated  doctor  who 
collected  books,  of  a  plump  canon's  intelligent  son 
home  for  the  vacation,  of  a  pair  of  spinster  ladies, 
with  wise  eyes  and  greying  hair,  living  at  peace  amid 
charming  furniture,  reading  a  well-chosen  parcel 
from  Mudie's  every  week.  Whatever  they  were  like, 
there  they  must  have  been.  Possibly  you,  reader, 
were  yourself  one  of  them,  and  would  have  been 
delighted  at  one — I  can't  promise  that  you  would 
have  Hked  more  than  one- — visit  from  so  congenial  an 
artist.  But  I  passed  your  door  with  a  sound  of  foot- 
steps hke  any  other  ;  I  heard  the  murmur  of  your 
voice  like  the  murmur  of  any  other  voice  ;  I  saw 
the  portico  of  your  house  for  the  first  time  and  the 
last,  and  have  now  forgotten  it.  Had  you  accident- 
ally come  to  the  door  I  might  have  spoken.  As  it 
was  I  went  back  to  the  hotel  and  was  bored. 

96 


CRITICS  IN  1820 

THE  centenary  of  Keats 's  "  Lamia  "  has  just 
— well,  I  won't  say  been  celebrated,  but 
occurred  ;  and  the  few  people  who  have 
commented  on  the  fact  have  dutifully  reminded 
themselves  how  wrong  their  predecessors  were 
about  Keats.  He  was  told  to  go  back  to  his  galley 
pots  :  the  Muse  could  have  no  relations  with  a 
Cockney  apothecary.  Reading  these  remarks,  and 
others  about  the  general  gullibiUty  of  critics  and 
their  common  failure  to  recognise  genius,  sent  me 
back  to  those  old  reviews. 

Certainly  they  contain  a  great  many  deplorable 
misjudgments  :  so  many  that  one  finds  some  com- 
fort in  Leslie  Stephen's  observation  that  "  criticism 
is  an  even  more  perishable  commodity  than  poetry." 
Keats,  except  from  his  personal  friend,  Leigh  Hunt, 
scarcely  got  a  word  of  printed  commendation  until 
just  before  his  death  ;  and  the  sales  of  those  volumes 
which  the  gallant  Taylor  and  Hessey  published 
were  grotesquely  small.  Generally  speaking,  he  was 
treated  as  a  contemptible  satellite  of  the  fractious 
Cockney  Radical,  Leigh  Hunt.  Blackwood,  in  an  article 
on  the  Cockney  school,  perpetrated  an  extremely 
sweeping  sentence,  when,  after  dressing  down 
Leigh  Hunt,  it  menaced  his  *'  minor  adherents 
...  the  Shelleys,  the  Keatses,  and  the  Webbes," 
not  the  least  remarkable  feature  of  which  sentence 
is  the  bracketing  of  Mr.  Webbe,  whose  very  name 
is  now  unknown,  with  two  of  the  greatest  of  English 

97  H 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

poets.  The  Quarterly  on  "  Endymion  "  was  almost 
as  sweeping.  It  began  its  review  with  : 

Reviewers  have  been  sometimes  accused  of  not 
reading  the  works  which  they  affected  to  criticise. 
On  the  present  occasion  we  shall  anticipate  the 
author's  complaint,  and  honestly  confess  that  we 
have  not  read  his  work. 

They  had  made  efforts,  but  no  power  on  earth  could 
carry  them  through  ;  they  even  questioned  whether 
the  author  could  be  really  called  Keats,  "  for  we 
almost  doubt  that  any  man  in  his  senses  would  put 
his  real  name  to  such  a  rhapsody."  After  several 
pages  of  trouncing  we  come  to  "  But  enough  of 
Mr.  Leigh  Hunt  and  his  simple  neophyte." 

Coleridge  and  Wordsworth  received  their  worst 
treatment  from  the  Monthly  Review,  the  remark- 
able organ  which  years  before  had  said  that 
"  The  Vicar  of  Wakefield  "  had  "  defects  enough 
to  put  the  reader  out  of  all  patience  with  an  author 
capable  of  so  strangely  under-writing  himself."  It 
reviewed  "  Lyrical  Ballads  "  (which  only  had  one 
review  in  its  first  three  months)  as  a  mere  series  of 
imitations  of  the  ancients,  with  the  comment,  "  None 
but  savages  have  submitted  to  eat  acorns  after  corn 
was  found."  The  "  Ancient  Mariner  "  was  described 
as  "  the  strangest  story  of  a  cock  and  bull  that  we 
ever  saw  on  paper."  "  Tintern  Abbey  "  was  admitted 
to  be  "  poetical,  beautiful,  and  philosophical,"  but 
*'  somewhat  tinctured  with  gloomy,  narrow  and 
unsociable  ideas  of  seclusion  from  the  commerce 
of  the  world  ;  as  if  men  were  born  to  live  in  woods 

98 


CRITICS  IN  1820 

and  wilds,  unconnected  with  each  other  !  "  "  Genius 
and  originality  "  were  discovered  in  the  publication, 
but— 

We  wish  to  see  another  from  the  same  hand, 
written  on  more  elevated  subjects  and  in  a  more 
cheerful  disposition. 

No  such  reservation  was  made  by  the  Mo?ithly 
about  "  Christabel."  The  rhythms  were  not  to  be 
tolerated  : 

We  have  long  since  condemned  in  Mr.  Scott 
and  in  Miss  Holford  and  in  fifty  other  males  and 
females,  the  practice  of  arbitrary  pronunciation 
assumed  as  a  principle  for  regulating  the  length 
or  rhythm  of  a  verse,  .  .  .  This  precious  pro- 
duction is  not  finished,  but  we  are  to  have  more 
and  more  of  it  in  future  !  " 

Were  it  not  that  good  writing  had  died  out  "  it 
would  be  truly  astonishing  that  such  rude,  un- 
fashioned  stuff  should  be  tolerated."  "  The  poem 
itself,"  was  the  conclusion,  "  is  below  criticism." 
Of  "  The  Excursion  "  we  know  Jeffrey  said,  "  This 
will  never  do,"  and  Brougham's  review  of  Byron's 
first  book  is  a  classic  : 

The  poesy  of  this  young  lord  belongs  to  the 
class  which  neither  gods  nor  men  are  said  to  per- 
mit. .  .  ,  His  effusions  are  spread  over  a  dead 
flat,  and  can  no  more  get  above  or  below  the  level, 
than  if  they  were  so  much  stagnant  water. 

99 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

There  certainly  was  weak  verse  in  the  book,  but 
there  was  much  that  was  precociously  clever,  and 
Brougham  was  absurd  when  he  said,  remarking  that 
everybody  wrote  poetry  when  young,  that  "  it  hap- 
pens in  the  life  of  nine  men  out  of  ten  who  are 
educated  in  England  ;  and  that  the  tenth  man  writes 
better  verse  than  Lord  Byron." 

"  Whatever  judgment,"  concluded  the  Edin- 
burghy  "  may  be  passed  on  the  poems  of  this  noble 
minor,  it  seems  we  must  take  them  as  we  find  them, 
and  be  content,  for  they  are  the  last  we  shall  ever 
have  from  him."  Within  ten  years  the  Edinburgh 
had  to  eat  its  words  pretty  thoroughly.  It  was  barely 
ten  years  aftervvards  that  the  great  notice  of"  Childe 
Harold  "  came  out  in  which  Byron  was  bracketed 
with  Rousseau  as  having  "  extraordinary  power 
over  the  minds  of  men,"  and  was  told  that  "  his 
being  has  in  it  all  the  elements  of  the  highest  poetry." 
And  to  do  reviewers  justice,  not  all  of  them  took  so 
long  to  wake  up  about  everybody.  Blackwood  may 
have  reprobated  Shelley,  but  it  called  '*  The  Revolt 
of  Islam  "  the  work  of  a  genius,  and  contrasted  Shelley 
with  his  contemporaries  :  "  Hunt  and  Keats,  and 
some  others  of  the  School,  are  indeed  men  of  con- 
siderable cleverness,  but  as  poets,  they  are  worthy 
of  sheer  and  instant  contempt." 

Mr.  Shelley,  whatever  his  errors  may  have 
been,  is  a  scholar,  a  gentleman,  and  a  poet ;  and 
he  must,  therefore,  despise  from  his  soul  the  only 
eulogies  to  which  he  has  hitherto  been  accustomed 
— paragraphs  in  the  Examiner  and  sonnets  from 
Johnny  Keats. 

ICO 


CRITICS  IN  1820 

Burns  obtained  recognition  from  the  Monthly 
in  the  very  year  of  his  Kilmarnock  volume  ;  Jane 
Austen's  "  Emma  "  received  an  elaborate  eulogy 
in  the  Quarterly  on  publication  ;  and  Alfred 
Tennyson  at  twenty-one  was  the  subject  of  a  full- 
length  article  in  the  Westminster  Review.  It  was  by 
John  Stuart  Mill,  and  began  in  a  characteristically 
Utilitarian  manner  : 

The  machinery  of  a  poem  is  not  less  susceptible 
of  improvement  than  the  machinery  of  a  cotton- 
mill  ;  nor  is  there  any  better  reason  why  the  one 
should  not  retrograde  from  the  days  of  INIilton, 
than  the  other  from  those  of  Arkwright. 

Tennyson's  merits  were  fully  exposed,  and  he  was 
urged  (he  unhappily  acted  on  the  advice)  to  turn 
himself  into  a  didactic  and  statesmanlike  poet. 

Let  us  not  be  too  gloomy  about  the  reviewers. 
They  are  at  their  worst  in  an  age  of  technical  and 
intellectual  transition,  when  change  revolts  them. 
Even  when  we  are  talking  of  the  Revolutionary 
epoch  we  must  remember  that  most  of  the  poets 
encouraged  each  other  ;  that  Charles  Lamb  was 
early  in  his  perception  of  the  greatness  of  Words- 
worth and  Coleridge  ;  and  that,  after  all,  there  was 
Leigh  Hunt.  He  was  also  a  critic,  as  much  as 
Brougham  and  Jeffrey,  and  his  soundness  deserves 
as  much  notice  as  their  fallibility.  He  scarcely  made 
a  mistake  ;  there  was  no  poetic  genius  of  his  age 
whom  he  did  not  detect  almost  instantly.  He  had 
something  of  the  poet  in  him  ;  and  the  poets,  though 
they  sometimes  made  mistakes,  are  as  a  rule  early 

lOI 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

to  discover  and  sedulous  to  encourage  contempo- 
raries of  genius.  That  any  man  who,  because  of  his 
poetical  knowledge  or  editorial  sagacity  or  for  some 
other  extraneous  reason,  happens  to  have  a  new 
book  to  review  should  be  expected  to  judge  it  cor- 
rectly is  too  much  to  expect.  Jeffrey  and  Brougham 
were  men  of  great  powers,  but  why  on  earth  should 
we  imagine  that  they  would  be  anything  but  mis- 
taken about  Byron  or  Keats  or  Shelley  when  these, 
in  their  immaturity,  first  appeared  ?  They  are  very 
inadequate  basis  for  the  despairing  deduction  that 
all  critics  in  all  ages  must  inevitably  be  wrong,  or 
can  only  be  right  by  chance. 


102 


AN  OLD  CALENDAR 

THERE  is  nothing  which  more  vividly  and 
acutely  evokes  the  past,  the  day-to-day  life 
of  the  past,  than  an  old  reference  book. 
By  reference  book  I  do  not  mean  encyclopaedia  or 
dictionary  :  those  certainly  are  reference  books, 
but  their  usefulness  is  not  confined  to  a  particular 
year  or  generation.  They  have  not  the  extreme 
topicality  of  the  annual  publication,  which  records 
events  of  the  past  year  that  may  never  be  recorded 
again,  which  announces  as  immediately  forthcoming 
events  that  come,  and  pass,  and  are  then  added  to 
the  cemetery,  which  contains  so  much  information 
that  for  a  moment  is  deemed  indispensable  and 
then  is  totally  neglected,  and  which,  a  year  or  two 
after  it  has  been  published,  may  never  be  looked  at 
again.  I  daresay  that  Dr.  Johnson's  "  Dictionary," 
though  long  ago  surpassed  in  size  and  accuracy,  if 
not  in  wit,  by  the  works  of  other  lexicographers,  is 
consulted  thousands  of  times  every  year.  I  am  not 
the  only  person  who  habitually  uses  it.  But  who 
save  myself  has  for  an  hour  this  year  taken  pity  on 
the  Cambridge  University  Calendar  for  1826  .''  Few 
indeed  have  access  to  it  ;  there  are  probably  not 
many  copies  in  existence  outside  the  libraries.  It  is 
the  sort  of  book  men  throw  away  as  they  do  super- 
annuated Whitakers.  But  here  and  there  one  will 
remain  on  some  high  shelf  in  a  country  house  where, 
a  hundred  years  ago,  the  great-grandfather  of  the 
present  tenant  was  fresh  from  the  University.  It 
was  from  such  a  house  that  the  copy  I  possess  found 

103 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

its  way  into  a  bookseller's  twopenny  box  ;  it  has 
come  down  from  the  past  with  something  of  the 
pathos  of  a  pressed  flower  ;  its  freshness  has  gone, 
but  it  has  a  fragrance  to  the  mind  ;  it  was  so 
ephemeral  and  yet  it  has  outlived  so  much  that  was 
more  soUd  ;  it  was  grown  and  blew  for  one  purpose, 
but,  preserved,  it  fulfils  another — to  recall  old  things. 
As  a  pressed  violet  bears  some  resemblance  to 
the  violets  of  last  spring,  so  the  University  Calendar 
of  1826  is  in  hue  and  petal,  though  the  hue  has  been 
dimmed  by  time,  like  the  University  Calendar  of 
1920.  Calendars  grew  smaller  in  those  days  ;  they 
had  not,  in  flowers  nor  in  works  of  reference,  our 
passion  for  size.  But  the  shape  is  similar,  the  grey 
boards  are  much  hke  those  we  know,  and  the 
arrangement  of  the  information  is  familiar.  The 
volume  is  printed  for  Deighton.,  of  Cambridge,  still 
existing  as  Deighton  and  Bell,  and  among  the  seven 
other  firms  by  which  it  is  to  be  sold  are  Longmans, 
Hatchards,  Simpkin  Marshalls,  and  Parker,  of 
Oxford,  whose  shop  is  still  admirable  and  still  in- 
habited by  a  learned  Parker.  Much  is  the  same,  but 
much  breathes  of  an  old  world.  The  Classical  Tripos 
had  only  just  been  started  ;  History  and  English 
had  not  been  dreamed  of  as  subjects  deserving 
whole-time  study  ;  mathematics  still  held  the  field 
as  the  principal  study,  with  theology  running  it 
hard.  The  fellows,  with  a  few  conspicuous  excep- 
tions, were  aU  celibate  clergymen,  and  the  most 
casual  glance  at  the  names  of  the  undergraduates 
—  less  than  half  as  numerous  as  they  were  when  the 
late  war  broke  out— will  show  that  the  University 
was    considerably    less    democratic    than    now.    It 

104 


AN  OLD  CALENDAR 

is  not  that  it  was  what  the  ignorant  call  merely  "  a 
playground  for  the  rich."  There  were  always  large 
numbers  of  poor  boys  with  scholarships — Dr.  John- 
son's name  need  only  be  mentioned,  or  Kirke  White's. 
But  these  were  mostly  sizars,  living  in  a  semi-menial 
state  ;  and  great  care  was  taken  to  distinguish  the 
Noblemen  from  the  Fellow-Commoners,  the  Fellow  - 
Commoners  from  the  Pensioners,  the  last  from  the 
Sizars.  Most  of  the  colleges  were  very  small  ;  King's 
was  still  a  closed  corporation  of  Etonians.  It  is  often 
observed  to-day  that  Trinity  (which  has  about  a 
fifth  or  a  sixth  of  the  undergraduates  on  its  books) 
is  disproportionately  large  ;  but  in  1826  Trinity 
and  St.  John's  together  were  half  the  University. 

It  is  all  interesting  to  one  who  knows  the  ground  ; 
great  changes  can  come  by  imperceptible  degrees. 
But  the  names  on  the  books  have  a  peculiar  fascina- 
tion. Lord  Palmerston  was  sitting  member.  Every 
page  is  thick  with  the  names  of  undergraduates  sub- 
sequently well  known.  Tennyson  and  his  group  had 
not  yet  come  up,  but  Frederic  Tennyson  was  at  St. 
John's,  and  among  the  Trinity  freshmen  was 
Edward  Fitzgerald,  whose  name  appears  near  the 
bottom  of  the  list  between  Edward  Arthur  lUing- 
worth  and  Thomas  Daniel  Holt  Wilson,  who  had 
probably  not  a  notion  w-ho  he  was.  Spencer  Walpole, 
John  Wordsworth,  Augustus  de  Morgan,  and  the 
Iron  Duke's  young  heir  were  also  i?i  statu  pupillari 
at  Trinity,  and  the  two  forlorn  sizars  at  Peterhouse 
included  one  Ebenezer  EUiott,  afterwards,  no  doubt, 
to  horrify  his  college  by  becoming  the  Corn  Law 
Rhymer.  At  Trinity  Hall  F.  D.  Maurice  was  in  his 
first  year,  and  among  the  fellow-commoner  B.A.s 

105 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

was  "  E.  G.  Lytton  Bulwer,"  who  had  won  the 
Chancellor's  medal  for  EngUsh  verse  in  the  previous 
year.  It  had  been  in  existence  thirteen  years  only. 
"  Timbuctoo,"  that  remarkable  adaptation,  had 
not  yet  been  submitted.  W.  M.  Praed  had  been  the 
winner  in  1823  and  1824,  "  Thos.  B.  Macaulay, 
Trin.,"  in  18 19  and  1821,  and  William  Whewell  in 
1 814.  It  was  a  great  feat  on  Whewell 's  part.  Few  of 
his  admirers  probably  arc  aware  of  it  ;  but  it  should 
not  be  forgotten  that  his  natural  ear  for  verse  was 
such  that  in  an  ostensibly  prose  passage  of  one  of 
his  mathematical  works  he  anticipated  the  stanza 
of  "  In  Memoriam  "  with  the  remarkable  sentence  : 
"  No  power  on  earth,  however  great,  can  stretch  a 
cord,  however  fine,  into  a  horizontal  line  which 
shall  be  absolutely  straight."  One  of  Browne's  medals 
in  the  preceding  year  had  been  won  by  Benjamin 
Hall  Kennedy  ;  the  list  of  his  immediate  prede- 
cessors included  "  S.  T.  Coleridge,  Jes."  (1792), 
whose  name  is  given  a  footnote  "  the  celebrated 
poet,"  indicating  that  he  had  made  amends  for  his 
lamentable  Cambridge  career.  Keate  and  Samuel 
Butler  (grandfather  of  the  enfant  terrible)  were 
Browne's  medalhsts  in  the  year  after  Coleridge. 
Nobody  has  ever  heard  of  the  man  who  in  1825  won 
that  remarkable  Seatonian  Prize  for  an  Enghsh  poem 
on  a  sacred  subject.  The  whole  list  of  those  who  had 
won  it  is  decorated  with  only  one  good  name,  that 
of  "  Chris.  Smart,  Pemb.,"  who  took  it  four  times 
in  succession  from  1750.  In  1826  they  still  did  not 
think  of  him  as  author  of  the  immortal  "  Song  of 
David  " ;  his  footnote  calls  him  merely  "  Translator 
of    Horace."    Some    fames    take    a    long   time    to 

106 


AN  OLD  CALENDAR 

mature,  and  a  still  longer  time  to  get  academic 
recognition.  But  the  Calendar  did  not  overlook  the 
fact  that  the  fourteenth  wrangler  in  1819  was  now 
"  Second  Professor  in  the  Mission  College,  Calcutta." 
1826.  It  was  that  year  which  saw  the  birth,  to  a 
Spanish  father  and  a  Scottish  mother,  of  Eugenie 
de  Montijo,  the  unhappy  lady  who  after  such  vicissi- 
tudes and  sufferings  died  the  other  day.  The  first  of 
the  Napoleons  had  been  dead  but  five  years  then ; 
every  undergraduate  remembered  hearing  the  news  at 
school.  George  IV  was  on  the  throne,  firmly  con- 
vinced that  he  had  fought  at  Waterloo  ;  Byron  had 
died  two  years  before  ;  it  was  the  year  of  Scott's 
"  Woodstock."  Keats  and  Shelley  were  as  near  to 
the  young  men  of  that  time  as  Brooke  and  Flecker 
are  to  us  ;  but  they  were  less  well  known,  and  only 
the  most  original  of  undergraduates  were  beginning 
to  read  and  talk  about  them.  Yet  I  suppose  that  to 
the  Empress  Eugenie  1826  seemed  like  yesterday, 
and  nothing  really  an  old  event  that  had  not  taken 
place  ten  years  before  it.  In  2014  possibly  there  will 
die  some  infant  of  this  year  who  will  have  acquired 
the  reverence  due  to  one  who  has  bridged  the  great 
gulf  of  history  separating  2014  from  ourselves.  And 
in  that  year  some  wandering  eye  may  light  upon  the 
Cambridge  University  Calendar  for  1920,  now  so 
very  commonplace,  and  find  it  romantic.  And  some 
mind  for  a  moment,  encountering,  reader,  your 
name  or  mine  in  the  list  of  members  in  the  books, 
may  linger  over  it  for  a  moment,  wondering  whether 
it  is  mere  fancy  that  that  name  has  been  encoun- 
tered before,  in  an  old  magazine  or  between  the 
covers  of  some  ragged  and  forgotten  book. 

107 


THE  SEAMAN'S  PROGRESS 

ALLEGORIES  are  not  in  fashion.  I,  for  one, 
am  not  regretting  this.  The  metaphor  and 
the  simile  are  well  enough ;  they  are  the  life- 
blood  of  much  good  literature.  An  occasional  parable 
we  can  read.  But  the  metaphor  which  goes  on  for 
three  hundred  or  six  hundred  pages  we  no  longer 
want  and  no  one  now  produces.  Probably  we  are 
right.  It  is  a  most  irritating  thing,  as  a  rule,  to  read  a 
narrative  and  be  conscious  all  the  time  of  another 
story  going  on  underneath.  Nothing  is  more  dis- 
tracting than  the  uneasy  uncertainty  as  to  whether 
there  is  an  allegory  present  in  a  work  or  not.  I  have 
never  enjoyed  reading  Spenser's  "  Faerie  Queene  " 
so  much  as  I  did  when  I  was  a  boy,  and  was  unaware 
that  Queen  Elizabeth  and  the  Earl  of  Essex  were 
supposed  to  be  involved  in  it  ;  and  I  resent  the 
recent,  not  entirely  unconvincing,  attempt  of  a  South 
African  professor  to  discover  a  philosophical  treatise 
beneath  the  multi-coloured  surface  of  Keats 's 
"  Endymion."  I  like  a  person  in  a  story  to  be  a  person 
and  not  a  personification.  The  more  uncertain  the 
allegory,  the  more  annoying  and  distracting  ;  but 
that  our  modern  dislike  and  distrust  of  all  allegory 
has  sense  behind  it  is  suggested  when  one  contem- 
plates the  allegorical  literature  of  the  past  and  dis- 
covers how  little  sustained  allegory  has  lasted.  There 
are  great  books  with  allegorical  elements,  such  as 
"  Don  Quixote  "  and  "  Pantagruel  "  ;  but  the 
authors  of  those  had  the  sense,  once  they  had  got 
their  general  implication  clear,  to  let  their  characters 

io8 


THE  SEAMAN'S  PROGRESS 

behave  as  such,  not  to  force  every  detail  into  some 
mechanical  symbolic  scheme.  The  one  great  allegory 
in  English,  the  author  of  which  really  succeeds,  is 
"  The  Pilgrim's  Progress."  He  had  to  face  the 
enormous  task  which  confronts  all  writers  of  close 
and  sustained  allegory  and  which  has  utterly  beaten 
most  of  them  :  the  task  of  making  every  incident, 
almost  every  sentence,  signify  some  thought  or 
action  on  another  than  the  obvious  plane,  and  at  the 
same  time  to  keep  the  surface-story  so  interesting  in 
itself  that,  with  full  knowledge  of  its  meaning,  one 
can,  if  one  likes,  forget  everything  except  that  sur- 
face-story. Bunyan  enchants  where  Phineas  Fletcher 
— whose  "  Purple  Island  "is,  I  suppose,  the  longest 
allegorical  poem  in  English — bores  to  the  point  of 
maddening. 

These  general  reflections  sprang  from  a  reading 
of  a  little  book,  not  well  known,  I  think,  which  I 
recently  came  across.  Its  title  is  "  The  Seaman's 
Spiritual  Companion,  or  Navigation  Spiritualised," 
by  William  Balmford,  "  published  for  a  general 
Good,  but  more  especially  for  those  that  are  ex- 
posed to  the  danger  of  the  Seas,"  by  Benjamin  Harris, 
in  "  Sweeting's  Rents,  in  Cornhil,"  in  1678 — "  price 
bound,  one  shilling  "  ;  and  it  tempts  me  to  add 
that  if  allegory  had  never  been  invented  we  should 
have  missed  some  of  the  naivest  and  most  amusing 
things  we  have.  It  is  the  absurd  single  metaphors 
that  stand  out  as  comic  in  the  seventeenth-century 
"  conceited  "  poets  ;  and  the  obscurer  allegorical 
writers,  of  course,  forcing  all  their  episodes  and 
lessons  into  one  series  of  comparisons,  produce 
long  strings  of  these  preposterous  things. 

109 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

Mr.  Balmford  was  a  Bunyan  manqui.  Writing  for 
his  sailors  in  nautical  diction  (much  as  obscurer 
writers  of  prose  tracts  in  our  own  day  will  symbolise 
the  soul's  pilgrimage  by  some  narrative  of  life  on 
the  railway  :  collisions,  danger-signals,  and  the 
Heavenly  Terminus)  he  was  ingeniously  exhaust- 
ive, and  every  page  of  his  book  contains  something 
odd.  The  oddity  begins  before  the  text  proper  : 
there  is  a  commendatory  poem  by  a  lady  friend 
(described  as  "  a  gentlewoman,  who  was  an  intimate 
friend  of  the  author's  "),  which  says,  amongst  other 
things  : 

It  is  not  common  for  the  Female  Kind 
In  Printed  papers  to  expose  their  mind  : 

a  sentence  which  certainly  could  not  be  written  to- 
day. There  follows  an  address  to  the  Courteous 
Reader,  which  states  that  "  the  First  Part  of  this 
Book  is  an  Introduction  to  the  Art  of  Soul-Naviga- 
tion, and  ought  to  have  been  so  Intituled  " — the 
separate  title-page  having  apparently  been  missed 
out  by  the  printer.  We  are  then  plunged  straight  on 
to  the  high  seas  with  : 

A  ship  at  sea  that  on  the  Waves  is  tost 

In  danger  every  moment  to  be  lost 

Is  a  true  emblem  of  man's  restless  state  : 

a  point  that  he  proceeds  to  drive  home,  adequately, 
to  say  the  least,  his  outline  being  the  thirty-two 
points  of  the  Spiritual  Compass,  by  which  the 
Mariner,  in  this  Ocean  of  Woe,  must  steer.  Here 
are  some  extracts  : 

no 


THE  SEAMAN'S  PROGRESS 
Rouse  up,  rouse  up,  and  ply  my  Pump,  my  soul. 

A  man  may  erre  in  faith  in  three  respects, 
All  which  produce  most  dangerous  effects. 

Hast  thou  a  mind  to  Traffick  for  Salvation 
Then  learn  the  art  of  Sacred  Navigation, 

Some  ply  the  Pump,  and  others  stand  to  sound. 
And  all  to  keep  themselves  from  being  drowned. 

In  such  a  case  a  Saint  that's  in  the  world 
Tost  to  and  fro  in  such  a  fury  hurl'd. 
Is  made  Sea-sick,  and  nothing  now  is  more 
A  Saint's  desire  than  Heaven  its  happy  sJiore. 

So  'tis  with  Christians,  Nature  being  weak, 
While  in  this  world,  are  liable  to  leak. 

Presumption  and  Despair,  on  these  two  rocks 
Whoever  runs  with  violence  and  knocks. 
If  on  the  first  of  these  his  soul  but  hit 
'Tis  very  seldom  but  the  soul  is  split. 

Satan  that  roaring  Lyon  goes  about. 

To  shipwreck  souls  his  work  it  is  no  doubt. 

'Tis  better  go  to  heaven  in  foul  weather. 
Through  many  dangers,  if  thou  getst  but  thither, 
Than  in  a  pleasant  gale  to  swim  to  hell, 
Where  gentle  winds  do  make  th'  canvas  swell. 


Ill 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

Our  language,  for  we  are  a  seafaring  people,  is  full 
of  nautical  idioms.  Most  of  them  come  into  Mr. 
Balmford's  poem,  notably,  "  on  the  rocks."  The 
one  I  miss,  and  he  had  many  opportunities  of  using 
it,  is  "  half-seas  over." 

Being  "  tost  to  and  fro,"  getting  into  "  foul 
weather,"  and  finally  "  splitting  "  on  certain  speci- 
fied "  rocks  "  are  all  of  them  very  popular  expres- 
sions in  current  political  slang,  and  nothing, 
apparently,  does  a  politician  more  harm  with  the 
electorate  than  to  take  a  line  of  action  that  can  be 
described  in  the  terms  of  one  or  other  of  these  meta- 
phors. Scottish  hecklers  seem  to  make  a  special 
study  of  them.  But  perhaps,  the  most  famiUar  of  all 
is  the  idea  of  Heaven  as  a  "  happy  shore,"  towards 
which  we  struggle  through  the  raging  seas  of  Hfe.  I 
should  not  care  to  say  how  often  this  metaphor 
occurs  in  the  hymns  of  the  Salvation  Army,  but  I 
remember  in  particular  one  verse  in  which  we  are 
advised  to 

Leave  the  poor  old  stranded  wreck 
And  pull  for  the  shore. 

In  the  "  life-boat,"  of  course. 


112 


I  DO  not  possess  ^15,100  ;  that  I  wish  I  did  is 
irrelevant.  Most  people  wish  they  did,  and  do 
not.  It  is  possible  that  Shakespeare,  who  was  a 
man  not  blind  to  the  amenities  of  life,  would  have 
liked  3(^15,100.  He  did  fairly  well  ;  he  was,  if  not 
the  C.  B.  Cochran  of  his  day,  at  least  one  of  its  most 
successful  managers.  He  bought  New  Place  and  he 
left  Anne  Hathaway  his  second-best  bed,  so  that 
(as  the  Shakespearean  commentators  say)  "  there 
is  little  reason  to  doubt  "  that  he  had  two.  In  his 
quiet  way,  being  a  man  of  taste  who  liked  old  tilings 
and  read  his  bestiaries  and  books  of  venery  as  w^ell 
as  his  Plutarch  and  his  Montaigne,  he  probably 
collected  books.  He  may  have  sometimes  given  as 
much  as  eight  or  nine  shillings  for  some  chronicle 
of  wasted  time  produced  by  the  fathers  of  printing 
or  the  mediaeval  monks.  He  may  have  heard  of  noble- 
men and  queens  who  had  paid  really  large  sums,  if 
not  for  books,  at  least  for  tooled  and  jewelled  bind- 
ings. But  it  cannot  be  supposed  that  he  would  have 
been  other  than  surprised  had  he  known  that  a  book 
(or  two  books  together)  of  his  own  would,  three 
hundred  years  after  his  death,  fetch  j^  15,100  at 
auction,  although  its  contents  were  everyw^here 
available  for  a  shilling  or  two. 

The  mania — I  use  the  word  in  no  derogatory 
sense,  for  I  share  it — for  first  editions  is  not  more 
than  a  century  old.  Men  liked  old  books.  Horace 
Walpole  liked  them,  Charles  Lamb  was  known  to 
forego  a  new,  and  much  needed,  pair  of  breeches 

113  I 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

for  a  folio  ;  many  books  fetched  fair  prices  in  the 
days  of  "  Anglo-Poetica  "  because  they  were  un- 
obtainable in  reprints.  Really  big  prices  begin  with 
the  Roxburgh  sale,  when  magnificent  specimens  of 
early  printing  drew  the  fashionable  world  to  the 
auction-rooms,  and  there  was  that  contest  between 
a  duke  and  an  earl  for  a  rare  Boccaccio,  which  the 
Rev.  Thomas  Dibdin  described  in  phrases  which 
would  have  been  something  turgid  if  applied  to  a 
mortal  struggle  of  Homeric  heroes.  The  first-edition 
cult  followed.  Prices  steadily  rose.  But  it  was  not 
until  the  last  generation,  when  American  buyers 
stepped  into  the  ring,  that  the  competition  for  rarities 
really  became  frenzied  and  prices  prodigious.  You 
are  now  lucky  if  you  get  a  first-class  copy  of  Herrick's 
"  Hesperides  "  or  Keats's  "  Lamia  "  under  ^^130, 
and  the  prices  paid  for  Shakespeare  folios  make  the 
sums  which  excited  the  world's  wonder  in  the  hey- 
day of  the  Mazarin  Bible  look  ridiculous.  Unless  he 
makes  a  find,  akin  to  the  discovery  of  Anglo-Saxon 
pennies  in  a  furrow,  the  ordinary  collector  can  no 
more  hope  to  possess  a  "  Venus  and  Adonis  "  than 
he  can  hope  to  become  Grand  Lama  of  Thibet. 

I  hear  everywhere  complaints  about  the  monstrous 
prices  now  prevailing.  No  book,  it  is  alleged,  can 
really  be  worth  ^(^15,100  ;  this  is  all  a  silly  fashion. 
That  is  not  a  tenable  view.  If  a  first  edition  may  be 
worth  ^100  it  may  be  worth  ^10,000.  To  most  of 
us  the  purest  rope  of  pearls,  except  as  a  negotiable 
security,  would  not  be  worth  3^15,100.  The  Cullinan 
diamond  itself  would  not  be  ;  in  fact,  one  would 
want  to  be  paid  very  heavily  even  to  wear  it  once  as 
a  stud.  At  the  back  of  this  criticism — which  is  also 

114 


heard  when  an  enormous  sum  is  given  for  a  picture 
by  a  great  artist  like  Rembrandt  or  a  second-rate 
artist  like  Romney — is,  I  suppose,  the  feeling  that, 
utility  apart,  the  purchaser  will  not  get  as  much 
pleasure  out  of  a  book  (of  which  the  text,  remember, 
is  obtainable  elsewhere)  as  he  would  out  of  a  similar 
sum  expended  on  something  else — modern  books, 
for  instance,  at  6s,  apiece.  But  it  should  be  remem- 
bered that  the  persons  who  buy  these  rarities  do 
not  starve  to  do  it  ;  they  have  all  the  other  pleasures 
they  want.  Some  of  them  are  genuine  collectors  who 
get  the  same  sort  of  pleasure  out  of  first  editions 
and  out  of  rarities  that  is  got  by  ordinary  collectors 
like  ourselves  who  think  twice  before  paying  a  pound 
for  a  book  :  a  few  thousands  mean  no  more  to  them 
than  a  pound  to  us.  Some  are  philanthropists  who 
desire — like  the  late  H.  C.  Frick  who  has  just  left 
millions  of  pounds  worth  of  pictures  to  New  York — 
to  leave  great  collections  to  public  institutions. 
Some  are  adventurous  persons  who  collect  as  a 
game,  and  go  out  to  beat  their  neighbour  in  the 
competition  for  rarities.  And  some  are  ostentatious 
vulgarians  who  will  do  anything  which  excites 
attention  and  envy.  Millionaires,  rich  philanthropists, 
rich  romantics,  and  rich  vulgarians  are  more 
numerous  and  more  opulent  in  the  United  States 
of  America  than  in  any  other  country  in  the  world. 
Hence  the  huge  prices  for  works  in  the  English 
tongue,  and  hence  the  constant  stream  of  works  of 
art  across  the  Atlantic. 

We  hear  ordinary  collectors  lamenting  and 
protesting  with  sneers  that  prices  are  grotesque, 
and  that  the  people  who  buy  these  books  do  not 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

really  appreciate  them.  They  fail  to  observe  that 
amongst  themselves  inequalities  of  wealth  produce 
results  precisely  the  same  in  kind.  One  man  can  go 
to  £^,  another  can  go  to  j^io  and  does  not  hesitate 
to  do  so.  As  there  are  only  three  copies  of  "  The 
Passionate  Pilgrim  "  in  the  world,  only  three  people 
would  be  able  to  possess  them,  whatever  the  price  : 
and  the  selection  of  those  three  would  be  just  as 
arbitrary  if  it  were  determined  by  anything  else 
than  wealth.  What  the  man  who  collects  and  knows 
literature  intimately  can  do  is  something  far  more 
amusing  :  namely,  hunt  for  and  purchase  those  rare 
or  good  books  (every  year  adds  to  their  number)  for 
which  hundreds  of  pounds  are  not  yet  being  given 
by  pork-packers  :  anticipate  the  market,  in  fact,  if 
not  from  commercial  motives.  A  poor  book  collector 
can  get  as  much  amusement  out  of  his  pursuit  to- 
day as  he  could  in  any  era,  though  the  books  he  finds 
will  not  be  those  that  were  found  when  Lamb  used 
to  pick  up  Burton  and  the  Dramatists  in  the  mean 
shops  off  the  Strand.  And  as  for  the  bitterness  about 
great  rarities  going  to  millionaires  and  to  America,  it 
is  surely  unreasonable.  The  millionaires  do  not  hoard 
their  books  for  long.  They  pass  them  rapidly  on  to 
public  libraries,  and,  meanwhile,  their  assiduity 
and  their  opulence  make  it  certain  that  copies  of 
very  rare  early  books  will  be  preserved  which  might 
otherwise  be  lost.  After  all,  if  there  are  only  a  few 
copies  of  a  book  where  better  could  they  be  than  in 
public  libraries,  where  everybody  can  see  them  and 
they  are  open  to  the  consultation  of  all  scholars  ? 
And  why  should  not  some  of  them  be  in  American 
libraries  ? 

ii6 


Whenever  an  expensive  book  (or  picture)  goes  to 
America  there  is  always  an  outcry  for  the  prohibition 
of  exports.  The  tumult  is  usually  to  be  observed  in 
quarters  not  ordinarily  conspicuous  for  a  devotion 
to  literature,  whether  old  or  new,  or  for  the  slightest 
acquaintance  with  the  technique  of  collecting.  Those 
who  make  it  arc  apparently  far  keener  on  making  a 
violent  appeal  to  the  emotions  than  they  are  on 
thinking  about  the  elements  of  the  question.  It  may 
be  postulated  that  of  every  English  book,  and  the 
rarer  or  the  greater  the  book  the  more  essential  this 
is,  there  should  be  a  copy  in  the  British  Museum, 
and  copies  if  possible  in  a  few  other  great  libraries. 
They  should  be  there  both  for  sentimental  reasons 
and  in  order  that  British  scholars  should  have  access 
to  original  texts.  It  is  always  (as  Mr.  Pollard  has 
recently  said  in  an  admirable  article  in  The  Observer) 
regrettable  when  a  "  unique  "  copy  of  a  book  leaves 
this  country.  But  beyond  this  where  is  the  hurt  to 
the  national  interest  ?  What  does  it  matter  whether 
the  twenty-fifth  copy  of  a  Shakespeare  quarto  is 
stowed  away,  unread,  behind  the  wire  screen  of 
the  Duke  of  Buckminster's  Ubrary  at  Grooby,  or 
whether  it  adorns  the  marble  halls  of  Mr.  Ephraim 
Seltzer,  on  Lake  View  Avenue,  Chicago  ?  Surely, 
not  a  bean.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  highly  desirable 
that  the  Americans  should  have  a  good  share  of 
what  are,  after  all,  in  large  measure  their  own  anti- 
quities. It  is  often  forgotten  that  the  English  language 
and  English  traditions — not  to  mention  EngHsh 
blood — are  not  the  exclusive  property  of  the  English 
people.  Shakespeare  antedated  even  the  Pilgrim 
Fathers,    and    (though    those    particular    Puritans 

117 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

probably  did  not  appreciate  the  fact)  they  had  as 
much  of  a  vested  interest  in  him  as  had  their  relatives 
whom  they  left  behind.  The  English  tongue  is  the 
tongue  of  Americans  ;  our  literature  is  theirs  ;  our 
first  editions  are  theirs  ;  and  at  this  date  they  have 
already  begun  to  take  a  fair  place  in  our  literary 
scholarship. 


ii8 


DICKENS'S  FRIENDS 

ONE  of  the  fattest  and  fullest  of  recent  books 
is  Mr.  J.W.T.  Ley's  "The  Dickens  Circle." 
Mr.  Ley  has  tabulated  about  a  hundred  of 
Charles  Dickens's  friends  and,  taking  them  indi- 
vidually or  in  groups,  brought  together  from 
memoirs  and  letters  a  great  pudding  of  information 
about  his  hero's  relations  with  them.  I  have  enjoyed 
the  book.  It  is  about  a  writer  who,  to  my  taste,  could 
be  less  easily  spared  than  all  subsequent  novelists 
put  together.  And  it  is  the  sort  of  book  which 
demonstrates  what  interesting  literary  works  may 
be  produced  by  men  who  altogether  lack  the  gift  of 
writing. 

Mr.  Ley  resembles  many  compilers  of  Uterary 
memoirs,  and  most  "  students  of  Dickens,"  in  that 
almost  his  sole  literary  gift  is  a  mastery  of  the  cliche. 
At  the  very  outset,  when  one  finds  the  sentence  "  If 
it  be  true  that  the  proper  study  of  mankind  is  Man, 
it  is  equally  true  that  men  most  reveal  themselves 
in  their  relations  with  men,"  one  knows  that  all  the 
other  old  sticks  will  parade  across  the  scene.  They 
do,  and  one  greets  each  with  a  cheer.  "  My  diffi- 
culty has  been  to  decide  what  to  omit,"  "  Of  the 
books  I  have  consulted,  I  could  not  possibly  give  a 
complete  list.  Their  name  is  Legion  "  :  thus  pro- 
ceeds the  preface.  And  the  opening  sentence  of  the 
book  proper  is  :  "  There  is  no  surer  test  of  a  man's 
character  than  to  ask,  '  Who  are  his  friends  ?  '  " 
Mr.  Ley  is  the  sort  of  devotee  who  continually  refers 
to  Dickens  as  "  Boz  "  ;    on  the  strength  of  that 

119 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

alone  one  could  be  certain  that  he  would,  when 
occasion  arose,  remark,  "  'Tis  true,  and  pity  'tis, 
'tis  true  "  ;  that  he  would  say,  "  It  must  have  been 
a  red-letter  day  for  the  obscure  young  newspaper 
reporter  on  which  he  learned  that  his  first  book 
was  to  be  illustrated  by  the  great  George  Cruik- 
shank,"  and  that  he  would  speak  of  death  as  the 
passage  into  the  Great  Beyond.  And  so  he  does.  It 
is  as  well  to  make  this  clear  lest  in  recommending 
this  book  to  the  leisured  reader  I  be  supposed  to 
imply  that  its  author  is  another  Walter  Pater.  But 
though  Mr.  Ley  is  not  an  artist  in  words,  it  does  not 
matter.  His  labour  has  been  mostly  research,  and  its 
products  are  mainly  quotations  and  anecdotes.  He 
has  collected  them  in  such  number  that  the  pub- 
lishers are  justified  in  claiming  that  his  is  the  most 
informative  book  of  the  kind  since  Forster's  "  Life." 
It  is  not  necessary  to  read  the  book  straight  through. 
If  you  do  you  may  get  tired  of  the  "  Dickens  Circle." 
Nobody  could  justly  call  it  a  Vicious  Circle  ;  but  a 
hundred  accounts  of  the  beginnings  and  develop- 
ments of  friendships  taken  in  sequence  are  apt  to 
seem  a  little  monotonous.  Besides,  there  is  no 
chronological  or  other  order  which  demands  con- 
secutive reading.  As  a  book  to  "  dip  into,"  with  or 
without  a  preliminary  reference  to  the  index,  it  is 
delightful.  You  get  an  immense  number  of  extracts 
from  Dickens's  letters,  many  stories,  many  por- 
traits of  "  Eminent  Victorians,"  mostly  of  the  not- 
quite-great  kind,  and  an  unsystematic  but  very 
illuminating  picture  of  London  in  the  'forties.  You 
also  get  the  charming  oddments  dear  to  that  super- 
ficial   antiquary    who    fives    in    most    of   us.    For 

I20 


DICKENS'S  FRIENDS 

instance,  Dickens,  Forster  and  Harrison  Ainsworth 
used  to  go  rides  : 

On  through  Acton's  narrow  High  Street,  with 
its  quaint  raised  pavement  and  ancient  red-tiled 
houses,  past  "  Fordrush,"  Fielding's  last  well- 
loved  home,  past  Ealing's  parks  and  long  village 
green,  round  through  orchard-bordered  lanes  to 
Chiswick,  with  its  countless  memories,  and  so 
by  Shepherd's  Bush  to  Wood  Lane  and  the 
Scrubbs,  home  again. 

The  thought  of  that  sylvan  ride  on  horseback  now 
gives  one  a  shudder.  It  is  all  new  bricks  and  trams  ; 
but  then  the  Bush  really  was  bushy,  Wood  Lane 
was  a  woody  lane,  and  the  Scrubbs  no  doubt  covered 
with  scrub.  There  is  no  mention  of  a  meal  in  this 
passage.  This  is  unusual.  Dickens's  contemporaries 
ate  on  the  slightest  provocation,  and  a  new  novel 
was  invariably  celebrated  by  a  tremendous  and  up- 
roarious tavern  dinner. 

One  is  impressed  again  with  the  unparalleled 
hold  that  Dickens  had  upon  his  generation,  a  hold 
far  wider  and  firmer  than  that  of  Walter  Scott  or 
of  Pope,  who  commanded  the  cultured  world  of 
his  day  as  Dickens  never  did,  but  whose  influence 
was  confined  to  that  world,  and  was  purely  an  in- 
fluence on  taste.  Before  he  was  thirty,  Dickens  was 
one  of  the  most  popular  men  in  the  English-speak- 
ing world,  and  years  before  that  he  had  established 
friendships  with  many  of  the  most  famous  men  of 
the  older  generation.  His  numbers  were  waited  for 
in  the  mining  camps  of  Australia  more  eagerly  than 

121 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

letters  from  home  ;  and  he  was  only  just  over  forty 
when  a  Lord  Chief  Justice  paid  him  one  of  the 
greatest,  though  it  be  one  of  the  most  decorous,  com- 
pliments ever  paid  to  an  author.  Dickens  had  been 
summoned  to  a  jury,  and  the  judge  said  : 

The  name  of  the  illustrious  Charles  Dickens 
has  been  called  on  the  jury,  but  he  has  not  an- 
swered. If  his  great  Chancery  suit  had  been  still 
going  on  I  certainly  should  have  excused  him, 
but  as  that  is  over  he  might  have  done  us  the 
honour  of  attending  here  that  he  might  have  seen 
how  we  went  on  at  Common  Law. 

The  whole  of  English-speaking  manhood  was,  in  a 
sense,  his  friend  ;  and  he  had  as  large  a  personal 
acquaintance  with  individuals  as  any  other  man 
could  conceivably  have  had. 

Mr.  Ley  ropes  them  all  in,  from  Samuel  Rogers 
to  Carlyle,  from  Lytton  to  Augustus  Egg,  of  whom 
he  says  :  "  In  the  novelist's  home  no  one  was  more 
welcome  than  Egg."  Macready,  Longfellow,  Thack- 
eray, Browning,  artists,  actors,  and  poHticians — 
they  are  all  there.  They  met  Dickens  in  an  atmos- 
phere of  excessive  geniality  and,  one  is  bound  to 
add,  of  generous  eating  and  drinking.  To  scores  of 
them,  and  of  scores  of  them,  the  emotional  and 
open-hearted  man  wrote  with  an  effusiveness  that 
sometimes  verges  on  gush.  It  is  possibly  significant 
that  numerous  though  his  friends  were,  they  did 
not  include  many  of  the  reticent  type  ;  it  is  notice- 
able that  the  Tennyson  chapter  is  very  short,  and 
perhaps   symbolical    that    the    name   of  Matthew 

122 


DICKENS'S  FRIENDS 

Arnold  does  not  even  appear  in  the  index.  The  air 
of  Dickens  was  a  little  warm  for  some.  He  longs  to 
hold  his  friends  in  his  arms  ;  he  tells  one  that  "  I 
will  fall  on  you  with  a  swoop  of  love  in  Paris  "  ;  he 
is  very  free  with  "  Again  and  again,  and  again,  my 
own  true  friend,  God  bless  you,"  and  "  God  bless 
you,"  and  "  God  bless  him,"  and  "  God  bless  her," 
are  phrases  even  more  common  in  his  letters  than 
in  his  works. 

He  was  Tiny  Tim,  with  some  of  the  defects  of 
that  noble  but  rather  wearying  child  ;  all  men  liked 
him  for  his  generosity,  humanity,  willingness  to 
work  his  hardest  for  others,  cheerfulness,  and  gal- 
lantry ;  but  they  reacted  variously  to  his,  as  some 
must  have  felt,  almost  too  opulent  benevolence, 
his  almost  too  jolly  joviality,  his  almost  embarrass- 
ing affectionateness.  Those  who  like  to  watch  straws 
to  see  which  way  the  wind  is  blowing  may  find  a 
perfect  straw  in  the  nomenclature  of  Dickens's 
children.  To  name  one's  children  after  one's  friends 
and  the  objects  of  one's  reverence  is  a  natural  and 
excellent  habit.  But  Dickens  overdid  it.  He  was  not 
content  to  do  the  ordinary  thing,  and  his  children 
went  through  life  branded  with  names  like  Alfred 
Tennyson  Dickens,  Walter  Savage  Landor  Dickens, 
Edward  Bulwer  Lytton  Dickens,  tokens  at  once  of 
his  sentimental  promiscuity  and  of  his  intemperance 
of  expression.  It  is  odd — no,  it  is  not  odd — that 
with  all  this,  all  his  communicativeness  and  sym- 
pathy and  his  multitude  of  friends,  he  leaves  one 
nevertheless  with  the  impression  that  the  last  in- 
timacies of  friendship  he  never  experienced.  He  is 
the  same  to^hundreds,  very  easily  ready  to  catch 

123 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

fire  if  a  sympathetic  spark  showed,  eager  to  establish 
a  contact  of  hearts  with  people  at  first  meeting.  But 
his  friendships,  I  think,  though  they  strengthened 
with  the  accumulation  of  mutual  memories,  did  not 
greatly  deepen.  All  that  liis  friends  were  likely  to 
know  of  Dickens  they  knew  soon.  That  is  to  say, 
they  none  of  them  thoroughly  knew  him  ;  and  I 
have  the  idea  that  he  did  not  know  himself.  After 
reading  the  whole  of  Mr.  Ley's  long  story  of  corres- 
spondences,  collaborations,  and  conviviaHties,  after 
one  has  seen  Dickens  a  thousand  times  as  a  minis- 
tering angel  inspiring  Hfe-long  gratitude,  one  still 
thinks  of  him  not  as  this  man's  friend  or  as  that 
man's  friend,  but  as  the  friend  of  the  human  race. 


124 


POETRY  AND  COMMONPLACE 

I  HAVE  been  reading  the  Warton  Lecture  on 
English  Poetry  which  was  recently  dehvered  to 
the  Britisli  Academy  by  Mr,  John  Bailey.  It  is 
very  seldom  indeed  that  anyone  talks  sense  about 
the  nature  and  functions  of  poetry  nowadays.  Dis- 
cussion has  been  furious  about  poetic  technique  : 
whether  or  not  people  should  write  in  regular  rhythm, 
or  how  far  rhyme  is  permissible.  There  has  also 
been  a  great  amount  of  talk  about  the  assimilation 
by  poetry  of  modern  philosophy,  modern  science, 
and  all  the  material  appliances  of  modern  civili- 
sation. One  man  has  said  that  rhyme  is  jingle, 
another  that  it  is  a  necessity.  One  man  has  said  that 
the  aeroplane  and  the  gramophone  are  unmention- 
able in  verse,  another  has  refused  to  acknowledge 
the  existence  of  any  poet  who  did  not  devote  his 
principal  attention  to  these  machines  and  things 
like  them.  Good  poets  usually  know  all  about  their 
business,  but  they  are  frequently  silent  during  these 
critical  controversies.  I  imagine  that  any  of  the  great 
poets  who  had  a  capacity  for  observing  and  group- 
ing facts  and  a  power  of  deduction  would  come  to 
very  much  the  same  conclusions  as  Mr.  Bailey,  For 
Mr.  Bailey's  contention — implied  if  not  explicit — 
is  that  most  of  the  controversy  is  off  the  point.  It  is 
a  mistake  to  talk  about  poetry  as  though  it  were  a 
new  thing,  or  as  though  it  ever  could  be  a  new  thing. 
And  it  is  a  mistake  to  conduct  an  argument  about 
the  content  of  poetry  except  in  the  light  of  the  body 
of  accepted  great  poetry  which  we  have  inherited, 

125 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

and  of  our  knowledge  of  the  human  heart  and  the 
permanent  conditions  of  human  Ufe. 

Mr.  Bailey  quotes  a  number  of  passages  of  which 
I  will  reproduce  one.  It  is  this  : 

Like  as  the  waves  make  towards  the  pebbled  shore, 
So  do  our  minutes  hasten  to  their  end. 

"  Where,"  says  Mr.  Bailey,  "  is  the  commonplace 
when  we  hear  that  voice  }  And  yet  what  can  be  a 
greater  platitude  than  that  every  moment  of  our 
lives  brings  us  nearer  to  death  ?  The  truth,  then, 
must  be  that  both  the  word  '  commonplace  '  and 
the  thing  it  represents  have  more  in  them  than  we 
at  first  sight  allow.  To  get  the  whole  truth  about 
them  we  need  the  old  good  meaning  of  the  word  as 
well  as  the  later  bad  meaning.  A  commonplace  may 
be  obvious,  but  it  may  also  be  a  universal  truth, 
and  as  great  as  universal  ;  only  that  its  universaUty 
and  its  universal  acceptance  have  now  blinded  us 
to  its  greatness."  He  goes  on  to  quote  Wordsworth, 
who  said  that  the  business  of  poetry  is  not  so  much 
the  discovery  of  new  truths  as  the  giving  of  new 
life  to  old  ones.  This,  he  says,  is  going  too  far.  Of 
course  it  is.  Poetry  springs  from  emotion  aroused 
by  the  contemplation  of  life  and  the  universe.  The 
material  complexion  of  the  universe  to  some  extent 
changes  with  the  progress  of  invention  and  dis- 
covery. New  philosophies  and  religious  conceptions 
come  into  being.  New  refinement  of  feeling  be- 
come known  to  him  who  feels.  It  is  quite  possible 
that  a  new  Wordsworth  may  write  a  great  poem 
inspired  by  the  contemplation  of  the  theory  of  Dr. 

126 


POETRY  AND  COMMONPLACE 

Einstein.  The  language  and  the  imagery  of  poetry 
will  change  with  the  changing  times  ;  I  think  it  was 
Coleridge  who  made  a  practice  of  attending  lectures 
on  physiology  in  order  to  acquire  new  metaphors 
and  new  similes.  But  in  a  certain  sense  Words- 
worth did  not  go  too  far.  For  in  the  first  place  what- 
ever it  is  that  inspires  the  emotion — the  response  of 
awe  or  wonder  or  hfe  to  the  beauty  and  the  mystery 
of  things — the  quality  of  the  emotion  remains  the 
same.  And  in  the  second  place  the  conditions  of  our 
life  are  such  that  the  mass  of  our  poetry  has  in  all  ages 
been,  and  will  probably  be  in  all  future  ages,  inspired 
by  things  that  do  not,  humanly  speaking,  change. 

Let  me  give  an  illustration  of  the  first  point.  Those 
who  are  so  anxious  that  every  new  acquisition  of 
the  race  should  be  embodied  in  literature  would 
afford  a  hearty  welcome  to  the  cholera  microbe.  I 
can  conceive  all  kinds  of  revolutionary  poems  about 
that  microbe.  I  daresay  that  they  have  been  written; 
that  they  were  full  of  ingenuity,  of  learning,  of  Latin 
names,  and  of  unscannable  lines.  They  may  have 
been  informative  and  interesting.  But  it  happens 
that  in  the  case  of  the  cholera  microbe  we  possess  a 
poem  by  the  discoverer  himself,  a  man  who  cannot 
naturally  be  charged  with  indifference  to  the  claims 
of  the  intellect  and  of  science.  He  is  Sir  Ronald 
Ross.  The  curious — or  rather  inevitable  and  not  at 
all  curious — thing  is  that  he  scarcely  mentions  the 
microbe  for  its  own  sake  at  all.  "  This  day,"  he 
begins  : 

relenting  God 

Hath  placed  within  my  hand 

A  wondrous  thing  . . . 

127 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

The  microbe  has  merely  served  as  an  instrument 
for  arousing  the  emotions,  as  old  as  the  race,  of 
gratitude,  wonder,  and  of  triumph.  It  is  from  these 
emotions  and  others  like  them  that  poetry  springs  ; 
work  that  has  not  these  behind,  whatever  it  is,  is 
not  poetry.  Brainwork  is  necessary  ;  observation  is 
necessary  ;  but  Milton  said  that  poetry  should  be 
simple,  sensuous  and  passionate,  and  Wordsworth 
said  that  it  derived  from  emotion  recollected  in 
tranquillity  ;  and  Milton  and  Wordsworth  were 
two  of  the  most  intellectual  of  all  our  poets. 

But  the  most  important  point  in  relation  to  the 
theme  which  is  so  ably  expounded  by  Mr.  Bailey 
is  that  over  and  above  this  there  are  certain  domi- 
nant objects,  more  than  all  others  capable  of  stirring 
our  emotions  and  moving  us  to  poetry,  which  persist 
through  all  the  generations.  That  this  has  been  so 
in  the  past  requires  little  demonstration.  You  may 
start  with  the  epics  of  Homer,  and  you  will  find 
that  their  principal  elements  are  as  familiar  and  as 
important  to  us  as  they  were  to  the  man  of  his  day. 
What  changes  have  taken  place  since  then  in  the 
surface  of  civihsation,  in  our  manners,  in  our  theo- 
ries, and  in  our  equipment.  The  gulf  between  the 
galley  and  the  Dreadnought  could  be  paralleled 
ten  thousand  times  ;  yet  what  is  there  in  the  Iliad  ? 
A  woman's  beauty,  a  war,  a  conflict  of  wills,  courage, 
cowardice,  wrath,  grief  for  a  friend,  the  laughter  of 
a  child.  Where  to  the  Greeks  was  the  appeal  of  the 
Odyssey,  except  in  that  picture  of  the  wanderer 
sailing  the  strange  seas  of  the  world,  succumbing 
to  temptation,  vanquishing  obstacles,  and  return- 
ing at  last  to  his  home  and  his  wife  ?  The  test  may 

128 


POETRY  AND  COMMONPLACE 

be  applied  to  almost  all  the  great  poetry  of  the 
world  ;  the  most  illiterate  audience  shares  with 
Shakespeare  a  profound  emotion  in  face  of  the 
tragedy  of  jealousy,  the  tragedy  of  unfortunate  love, 
the  tragedy  of  neglected  old  age.  We  may  do  this, 
that,  and  the  other.  We  may  fly,  burrow,  and  poison 
each  other  with  gas.  But  to  the  masses  of  men  the 
principal  things  in  life,  the  things  which  loom  largest 
and  most  frequently  as  the  vehicles  of  that  which 
inspires  emotion,  are  what  they  always  were.  We 
are  all  born  and  do  not  know  where  we  came  from  ; 
we  all  have  a  childhood  on  which  we  look  back  ;  we 
all  experience  love  and  the  domestic  affections,  the 
types  of  which  have  not  changed  ;  we  live  in  a  land- 
scape of  which  the  main  features — hills,  trees,  waters, 
clouds — are  permanent  ;  we  all  know  that  at  the 
end  of  our  road  is  death,  and  after  that  something 
concerning  which  we  cjuestion  the  midnight  sky  in 
vain.  Into  this  simple  framework  are  our  lives  fitted; 
and  however  a  few  of  us  may  specialise,  and  some 
may  find  in  the  joy  of  the  novelty  of  exploration 
obUvion  from  the  conditions  of  the  common  lot  (a 
phrase  which  implies  a  recognition  of  Mr.  Bailey's 
contention),  it  is  in  the  contemplation  of  them  that 
most  men  and  most  poets  must  inevitably  find 
themselves  most  frequently  and  most  profoundly 
moved. 


129 


SHAKESPEARE  &  THE  SECOND  CHAMBER 

IF  ever  Shakespeare  of  Stratford  is  dislodged 
from  his  acknowledged  position  as  author  of  the 
plays  and  poems  first  published  as  his,  it  seems 
certain  that  a  peer  of  the  realm  is  destined  to  re- 
place him.  None  of  the  iconoclasts  ever  puts  forvvard 
anyone  so  humble  as  a  baronet.  The  most  popular 
candidate  is  still  Francis  Bacon,  Lord  Verulam. 
Roger  Man  vers,  Earl  of  Rutland,  has  been  sup- 
ported on  very  insufficient  grounds,  and  last  year  a 
very  learned  Frenchman  claimed  to  have  traced  the 
authorship  to  William  Stanley,  Earl  of  Derby,  per- 
haps by  way  of  delicate  compliment  to  our  present 
Ambassador  in  Paris.  Now  comes  a  new  claimant. 
He  is  Edward  de  Vere,  seventeenth  Earl  of  Oxford, 
and  premier  earl  of  the  realm  ;  the  proofs  that  he 
was  the  true  Swan  of  Avon  are  contained  in  "  '  Shake- 
speare '  Identified  "  by  J.  Thomas  Looney. 

Mr.  Looney  lets  us  into  the  whole  progress  of  his 
speculations.  He  began  in  the  ordinary  way  with 
doubts  like  Sir  George  Greenwood.  Shakespeare 
could  not  have  known  all  that  law,  all  that  Latin, 
all  that  about  sport,  all  that  about  Italy.  What  sort 
of  education  could  he  have  had  at  dirty  and  ignorant 
Stratford,  a  town  "  destitute  of  books  "  ?  "  There 
is  no  evidence  that  William  Shakespeare  was  ever 
inside  of  a  school  for  a  single  day  "  ;  why  should 
he  do  so  "  in  the  unwholesome  intellectual  atmo- 
sphere of  Stratford  "  ?  What  little  we  know  (and  we 
certainly  do  know  very  little)  about  Shakespeare 
is  commonplace    and    reflects    neither    credit   nor 

130 


SHAKESPEARE  &  THE  SECOND  CHAMBER 

discredit  on  him.  Deciding  that  Shakespeare  was  not 
the  man,  Mr.  Looney  formulated  his  own  ideas  as 
to  the  sort  of  man  he  should  look  for.  He  found  the 
man — an  aristocrat,  a  lyric  poet,  a  man  connected 
with  the  stage,  a  man  passionate  and  tortured  by  a 
woman,  a  man  travelled  and  witty — in  Lord  Oxford. 
He  looked  up  Lord  Oxford's  acknowledged  poems 
and  fancied  he  saw  in  them  (what  I  do  not  see)  con- 
vincing resemblances  to  Shakespeare's  and  a  promise 
of  mighty  maturity.  He  then  examined  Lord  Ox- 
ford's life  and  the  plays  and  found  what  he  thought 
striking  resemblances  between  them,  including  a 
remarkable  parallel  to  the  revolting  crisis  of  "  All's 
Well."  He  finally  persuaded  himself  after  exhaustive 
chronological  researches  that  Lord  Oxford  wrote 
"  Shakespeare,"  that  Meres  and  many  others  knew 
it,  that  authentic  publication  was  suspended  in  1604 
when  he  died,  and  that  the  First  Folio  was  pubHshed 
by  a  secret  committee,  probably  including  Lord 
Southampton.  Will  Shakespeare  the  actor,  who 
had  earned  scarcely  a  shilling  by  acting  or  manag- 
ing, grew  fatter  and  fatter  on  the  price  of  his  name 
and  (possibly  ?)  on  the  price  of  silence.  Why  the 
deception  should  have  been  kept  up  so  long  after 
Oxford's  death  is  not  revealed. 

Well,  it  is  all  very  interesting.  If  ever  I  get  past 
work,  past  the  violent  emotions,  past  a  desire  to  do 
anything  or  change  anything,  with  everything  of 
fire  in  me  subsided  to  a  weak  glow,  I  think  I  shall 
probably  amuse  my  waking  and  invite  my  sleeping 
hours  with  the  literature  of  the  Shakespeare  problem. 
To  no  problem  has  been  devoted  so  much  fruitless 
industry  and  misplaced  industry,  none  has  provoked 

131 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

so  much  and  such  far-reaching  argument  from  in- 
adequate premises,  argument  ranging  from  the 
briUiant  subtleties  of  clever  men  ridden  with  a  theory 
to  the  magnificent  tomfooleries  of  sheer  idiots — in 
neither  of  which  categories  do  I  place  the  sober  and 
almost  plausible  deductions  of  Mr.  Looney.  Nothing 
seems  to  exhaust  the  question  ;  this  year  it  is  Lord 
Oxford,  next  year  it  may  be  the  Earl  of  Devon,  or 
Lord  Lonsdale,  if  there  was  a  Lord  Lonsdale  then. 
Now  the  evidence  is  mainly  cryptogrammic,  now 
it  is  sartorial,  now  it  comes  out  of  the  plays,  now  out 
of  private  documents,  now  out  of  the  secret  records 
of  the  Rosicrucians.  An  enormous  number  of  Eliza- 
bethans have  not  yet  been  tried  as  possible  authors 
{e.g.,  Queen  Elizabeth  herself),  and  a  vast  amount 
of  Elizabethan  literature  has  still  to  be  searched, 
sifted,  decoded  for  clues.  This  controversy  is  not 
going  to  stop  ;  the  mystery  of  Shakespeare  really 
is  sufficient  of  a  mystery  to  guarantee  an  apostolic 
succession  to  the  line  of  Donnellys  and  Gallups  and 
Lefrancs  and  Looneys.  The  literature  they  produce 
offers  inexhaustible  amusement  of  a  mild  kind  to 
the  man  who  does  not  believe  in  them  or  expect  to 
be  converted.  And  I  do  not  expect  to  be  converted, 
I  have  seen  enough  of  men  of  genius  to  know  that 
they  may  come  from  the  most  surprising  places, 
learn  the  most  surprising  things,  and  behave  in  the 
most  surprising  way — even  to  the  point,  Mr.  Looney, 
of  accumulating  money  and  retiring  into  the  country 
on  it — even  to  the  point  of  living  normally  among 
their  county  neighbours  without  leaving  that  "  very 
strong  impression  "  which  Squire  Shakespeare,  of 
New  Place,  for  all  his  powers  (and  perhaps  because 

132 


SHAKESPEARE  &  THE  SECOND  CHAMBER 

he  did  know  so  much  of  men),  apparently  failed 
to  make  upon  his  neighbours  at  Stratford.  I  think 
Shakespeare  may  well  have  been,  to  Stratford, 
normal  :  the  imaginative  view  of  him  at  home  was 
well  developed  in  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy's  tercentenary 
poem.  I  can  swallow  the  lawsuits,  the  acting,  the 
will,  the  second-best  bed,  the  fortune,  and  the  feats 
of  self-education,  and  even  the  Stratford  bust,  far 
more  easily  than  I  can  this  monstrous  figment  of  a 
conspiracy,  known  to  very  many  people  and  men- 
tioned by  none,  this  cloaked  and  skulking  author  of 
rank  never  convicted  of  the  greatest  works  the  human 
brain  ever  conceived  until  three  hundred  years  after 
his  death.  Especially  do  I  not  believe  in  that  widely 
shared  secret.  Suppose  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy,  with 
the  collusion  of  Lord  Balfour,  Lord  Hugh  Cecil,  and 
Lord  Haldane,  and  the  co-operation  of  the  Poet 
Laureate,  Mr.  Gosse,  Mr.  Gerald  du  Maurier,  Mr. 
Owen  Nares,  and  others,  had  over  a  long  period  of 
time  attempted  to  palm  off  the  authorship  of  his 
novels  and  poems,  for  private  reasons,  upon  the 
late  Sir  H.  Beerbohm  Tree.  Does  Mr.  Looney 
seriously  suppose  that  it  would  not  have  leaked  out  ; 
that  nobody  would  mention  it  in  letter  or  diary  ; 
that  nobody,  after  the  masquerader's  death,  would 
pass  it  on  by  word  of  mouth  ;  that  the  grand  secret 
would  only  be  arrived  at  after  elaborate  textual  criti- 
cism in  the  year  2220  by  some  American  lady  or 
retired  English  judge  ?  Alas,  no  !  Secrets  are  not  kept 
like  that. 

But  I  will  say  this  :  that  there  are  two  small  things 
that  make  me  wish  that  the  Looney  theory  could  be 
true.  One  is  that  if  it  were,  Cambridge  University 

133 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

(my  own  college  in  it)  would  have  a  final  argument 
to  clinch  its  contention  that  it  is  unequalled  as  a 
nurse  of  poets.  The  other  is  that  I  really  hate  to 
think  that  the  author  of  the  "  Midsummer  Night's 
Dream  "  was  anything  like  the  bust  on  Shakespeare's 
tomb  at  Stratford.  There  is  reason  to  believe  (I 
think  an  illustration  to  Dugdale  is  the  authority) 
that  the  Stratford  bust  has  been  altered  since  it  was 
put  up.  The  original  face  was  not  that  podgy,  com- 
placent mug  which  now  produces  automatic  rapture 
in  tourists,  but  which  must  inspire  him  who  looks 
at  it  in  an  unprejudiced  way  with  feelings  of 
repulsion  and  contempt.  It  was,  according  to  the 
rough  old  engraving,  a  more  worn  and  hollow,  if  a 
more  morose,  face.  But  even  that  earlier  bust  was 
unlovely,  and  Edward  de  Vere  (the  Duke  of  Rut- 
land's portrait  of  him  is  a  fine  and  convincing  work) 
had  a  beautiful,  proud,  spirited  face  with  all 
passion  and  all  laughter  latent  in  it.  The  First  Folio 
portrait  one  cannot  discuss  because  Mr.  Looney — 
and  there  is  the  crudest  kind  of  resemblance  in 
general  outline — holds  that  it  was  meant  to  be  a 
portrait  of  Oxford.  They  could  scarcely  have  dared 
publish  such  a  portrait  of  any  man  while  he  was 
alive.  .  .  .  And  yet  the  devotees,  who  will  never 
yield  an  inch,  often  bring  themselves  to  maintain 
that  the  Folio  face  is  a  fine  face,  just  as  they  will 
maintain,  on  the  strength  of  those  Planchette  sig- 
natures, that  the  man  of  Stratford  wrote  a  fine  bold 
flowing  hand.  He  did  not.  But  in  spite  of  Mr.  Looney 
I  still  think,  in  the  absence  of  proof  to  the  contrary, 
that  he  wrote  the  plays  published  over  his  name. 


134 


ON  BEING  A  JONAH 

IHA\^  never  much  cared  for  the  minor  prophets, 
as  men.  Circumstances,  of  course,  were  against 
them.  They  fell  upon  evil  times,  and  it  was  their 
duty — one  sometimes  beats  down  the  suspicion  that 
it  was  also  their  pleasure — to  spend  most  of  their 
time  denouncing  those  who  offered  up  burnt  sacri- 
fices in  high  places  or  walked  in  the  way  of  the 
children  of  iniquity.  Their  forefingers  were  fixed 
in  the  posture  of  accusation,  and  their  favourite 
monosyllable  was  "  Woe."  They  were  disinterested 
men,  but  brooding,  angry,  vehement,  sometimes 
soured,  men.  Amongst  them  all  I  have  always  felt 
least  sympathy  for  the  prophet  Jonah.  A  certain 
compassion  with  him  in  his  submarine  period  we 
must  all,  of  course,  have  felt.  But  he  is  not  an  attract- 
ive character.  His  vindictiveness  against  the  Nine- 
vites  was  extreme.  I  have  not  my  Bible  with  me,  but 
I  seem  to  remember  that  he  was  disappointed  when 
they  were  not  all  extirpated  :  Jehovah  was  too 
merciful  for  him.  A  morose,  splenetic,  fanatical, 
black-avised  man. 

I  feel  a  little  closer  to  Jonah  now  than  I  did. 
They  say  that  men,  the  survivors  from  some  great 
shared  enterprise  or  calamity,  are  bound  together 
by  a  comradeship  of  experience.  It  is  so  ;  millions 
of  soldiers  can  attest  the  fact.  It  is  something  of  this 
kind  that  has  drawn  me  closer  to  the  prophet  Jonah. 
Contact  has  been  established.  We  have  suffered 
alike,  and  we  have  something  in  common.  Now  I 
hasten  to  add  thac  I  have  not  been  swallowed  by  a 

13s 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

whale.  Nor  do  I  expect  to  be.  Palmists  who  have 
examined  my  clerkly  hand  have  predicted  many  and 
various  fates  for  me,  numerous  early  deaths  in  the 
most  diverse  circumstances,  deaths  by  field  and 
flood,  ship  and  railway.  But  not  even  a  palmist — 
and  palmists  stop  at  little -has  ever  told  me  that  I 
should,  mortally  or  other^vise,  lodge  in  the  belly  of  a 
great  fish.  It  is  not  this  ;  it  is  the  immediately  prior 
experience  that  has,  though  by  proxy,  befallen  me. 

I  discovered  that  one  of  my  works  had  for  some 
weeks  been  out  of  print.  I  asked  my  pubhsher  why 
this  was.  His  answer  took  the  form  of  a  file  of  corres- 
pondence received  by  him.  The  first  letter  (as  this 
is  not  an  advt.  I  suppress  the  name  of  the  book) 
was  from  a  firm  of  printers  in  Scotland.  It  ran  : 

Dear  Sir, 
We  have  received  a  communication  from  the 

Shipping  Company informing  us  that 

the  s.s. ,  which  sailed  on  the  20th  inst.,  has 

been  aground  and  that  a  portion  of  the  cargo  had 
been  jettisoned.  We  despatched  by  this  boat  the 
undernoted  on  your  account,  and  shall  be  glad  to 
know  at  your  earliest,  if  any  or  part  of  it  has  been 
received. 

The  undernoted  consisted  of  a  thousand  copies  of 
me.  Enquiries  followed  ;  a  letter  passed  the  other 
way ;  and  a  second  communication  came  from 
Caledonia  : 

Dear  Sirs, 

We  are  in  receipt  of  your  letter  of  January  2nd, 
and  regret  to  hear  that  the  5  bales  have  been 
136 


ON  BEING  A  JONAH 

jettisoned,   which   confirms   the   report   we   have 
received. 

We  are  sorry  to  say  they  were  not  insured  by 
us. 

And  finally,  the  binders  woke  up.  They,  too,  appar- 
ently, had  been  all  agog  to  receive  my  works  ;  look- 
ing forward  to  binding  them.  But  they  were  men 
accustomed  to  concealing  their  emotions,  typically 
English,  reluctant  to  make  demonstrations  of  sorrow 
or  wear  their  hearts  on  their  sleeves.  Their  letter 
ran  : 

Dear  Mr. , 

The  5  Bales  of  above  have  been  thrown  over- 
board we  have  found  out. 

Yours  faithfully, 

There  ended  the  dossier. 

I  have  endeavoured,  lying  awake  in  the  darkness, 
to  reconstruct  the  scene.  The  sailors,  I  think,  were 
slightly  dubious  about  Jonah  from  the  first  day  out. 
They  thought  there  was  something  a  little  sinister 
about  him.  He  was  not  "  simpatico,"  not  (as  the 
Esperantists  so  compactly  put  it)  "  samideano." 
That  first  day  out  of  port  they  looked  at  him  with 
sidelong  eyes,  and  wondered  whether  they  wouldn't 
have  preferred  a  black  cat  or  a  Friday  sailing.  The 
second  day  they  thought  seriously  of  dumping  him 
into  a  barrel  of  pork  in  order  to  express  their  dis- 
like and  distrust.  The  third  day,  as  you  will  see, 
there  was  nearly  a  mutiny  over  the  fatal  five  bales 
of  incomprehensible   books.   Similarly,   I   conceive 

137 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

that  these  mariners,  who  out  of  all  that  cargo  selected 
my  works  for  sacrifice  when  the  moment  for  sacrifice 
came,  had  scented  in  them  something  they  disliked 
from  the  start. 

The  steamer,  I  think,  was  going  down  the  Firth 
of  Forth,  in  a  dead  calm,  with  the  black  smoke  lying 
flat  and  thick  behind  her,  when  some  idle  seaman, 
clambering  over  the  cargo,  came  upon  those  five  bales 
and  wondered  what  they  contained.  One  of  them 
had  a  slight  rent  through  which  protruded  a  glaring 
yellow  cover.  Ben  Gunn,  or  Ole  Petersen,  yielded, 
tugged,  and  began  to  peruse.  He  shifted  his  quid, 
and  knitted  his  brows  ;  he  uttered  a  full-flavoured 
nautical  equivalent  of  Stevenson's  young  man's 
exclamation  on  seeing  the  old  Athenceum  :  "  Golly, 
what  a  paper  !  "  Very  gingerly  he  stufi^ed  my  in- 
comprehensible compositions  back  into  the  sack, 
and  went  to  ruminate.  At  evening  in  the  fo'c'sle 
he  grumbled  to  his  mates  that  there  was  something 
unlucky  on  board,  gibberish  in  what  looked  like 
EngHsh  and  bore  some  resemblance  to  verse.  All 
along  the  Lothian  and  Berwick  coast  when  darkness 
fell  the  watch  cast  glances  of  malediction  upon  those 
sacks,  whose   canvas  faintly  shone  in  the  lantern 

light. 

The  wind  freshened.  It  rained.  The  wind  whistled. 
It  sleeted.  The  wind  roared.  The  sea  rose.  Lurching 
and  pitching  she  went  ahead,  drifting  shorewards, 
shipping  water  at  every  roll.  Through  the  mirk 
could  be  descried  a  lee  shore,  cliff's,  one  or  two  misty 

lights.  "  We  must  lighten  or "  shouted  the 

captain  to  the  first  officer.  "  Aye,  aye,  sir,"  repHed 
the  first  oflicer  to  the  captain.  "  Is  there  any  cargo 

138 


ON  BEING  A  JONAH 

with  which  the  world  could  easily  dispense  ?  "  asked 
the  captain.  **  Yes,  sir,"  said  the  first  officer  ;  "  there 
are  many  volumes  of  Herbert  Spencer,  ten  crates 
of  gramophones,  and  the  collected  edition  of  Mr. 

's  speeches."  "  I  like  them  all,"  said  the 

captain.  "  Please  suggest  something  else."  At  this 
point  the  conversation  was  cut  into  and  so  was  the 
Gordian  knot.  A  bronzed  and  bearded  sailor  stag- 
gered up  ;  holding  on  to  the  taffrail  with  one  hand  and 
touching  his  forelock  with  the  other,  he  explained 
that  the  crew  refused  to  do  another  hand's  turn 
unless  five  bales  of  books  by  Squire  were  thrown 
overboard.  "  We  knew,  sir,"  said  he,  "  that  there 
was  suthin'  fishy  about  them  books  the  moment 
they  come  aboard.  This  ship  won't  come  to  no  good 
until  they  be  over  the  side."  There  was  no  argu- 
ment. The  unhappy  books,  speechless  themselves, 
had  no  defenders.  Ten  men  with  glittering  eyes  and 
bared  teeth  crawled  towards  them,  two  to  a  bale. 
They  seized  them,  and  with  a  last  vengeful  curse 
flung  them  far  out  into  the  maw  of  an  advancing  wave. 
A  thousand  copies  !  Down  they  fell,  through  the 
boiling  wrath  of  the  sea's  surface,  into  the  more 
equable  waters  below,  and,  in  zigzag  shift,  settled 
to  the  sandy  bottom.  There  they  lie  at  this  moment, 
in  the  Uttle  depressions  they  have  made.  It  is  a  fine 
day  and  something  of  sunlight  filters  down  to  them. 
One  of  the  sacks  has  burst  open  and  its  fatigued 
contents  have  tumbled  out ;  shut,  gaping,  open 
wide,  face  upwards,  face  downwards.  Odd  corners 
of  print  can  be  seen  ;  and  at  intervals  through  the 
opaque  green  a  phantom  fish  glides  up  and,  with 
staring  eyes,  slowly  wagging  its  fins  and  gills,  gapes 

139 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

at  this  pile  of  indigestible  matter.  Then  he  goes 
away.  And  I,  for  one,  don't  blame  him. 

But  I  have  my  consolations.  Those  ruffians  may 
have  thrown  me  overboard.  But  it  did  not  save 
them.  They  were  wrecked. 


140 


.    VALOUR  AND  VISION 

"AS  the  primary  object  of  this  little  book  is 
/  \  to  help  a  cause  clear  to  the  heart  of  most 
X  .A.  English  people,  an  excuse  for  the  appear- 
ance of  yet  another  war  anthology  is,  perhaps,  not 
so  necessary  as  some  explanation  of  the  motives 
guiding  the  choice  and  arrangement  of  the  poems." 
This  is  the  opening  of  the  prefatory  note  to  Miss 
Jacquehne  Trotter's  "  Valour  and  Vision."  The 
profits  from  the  book  are  to  be  devoted  to  the  In- 
corporated Soldiers'  and  Sailors'  Help  Society  ; 
but  as  it  happens  the  book  would  have  been  justified 
without  that.  It  is  true  that  there  have  been  numbers 
of  war  anthologies  (the  latest  was  the  biggest  and 
the  worst),  but  none  of  them  until  this  has  been 
satisfactory.  The  compilers  of  most  of  them  have 
had  no  other  qualification  for  their  task  except  an 
indisputable  patriotism  and  a  total  incapacity  to 
distinguish  between  genuine  poetry  and  imitative 
verse.  Miss  Trotter's  book  is  on  another  plane.  She 
has  missed  very  few  of  the  good  poems,  whether 
by  soldiers  or  by  civiUans,  inspired  by  the  war,  and 
she  has  included  very  little  rubbish.  There  are  here 
a  few  poems  that  can  only  be  called  doggerel.  JMost 
of  them  relate  to  the  Navy.  The  Navy,  I  suppose, 
had  to  be  represented,  but  it  is  traditionally  speech- 
less. The  great  rush  of  civilian  recruits  with  hterary 
tastes  went  into  the  Army  ;  some  joined  the  R.N.D., 
but  those  fought  and  wrote  as  soldiers.  Whatever 
the  reason,  literature  has  not  come  from  the  Navy, 
and  the  celebrations  of  its  vigils  and  its  victories  has 

141 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

been  mainly  left  to  civilians,  who  have  sat  down, 
invoked  the  shades  of  dead  admirals,  remembered 
that  destroyers  are  lean,  and  pounded  out  verses  as 
hollow  as  they  are,  superficially,  lively.  These 
blemishes  might  well  be  removed  from  the  book, 
but  it  is  a  beautiful  selection,  and  (I  think)  the  first 
which  has  been  arranged  with  intelligence  and 
imagination.  Miss  Trotter  has  recovered  the  war 
atmospheres  in  sequence.  She  opens  with  Mr. 
Binyon's  fine  "  Fourth  of  August  "  : 

Now  in  thy  splendour  go  before  us, 
Spirit  of  England,  ardent-eyed. 

Enkindle  this  dear  earth  that  bore  us. 
In  the  hour  of  peril  purified. 

and  ends  with  some  beautiful  lines  by  Mr.  Lyon  : 

Now  to  be  still  and  rest,  while  the  heart  remembers 
All  that  it  learned  and  loved  in  the  days  gone  past, 

To  stoop  and  warm  our  hands  at  the  fallen  embers, 
Glad  to  have  come  to  the  long  way's  end  at  last. 

Now  to  awake,  and  feel  no  regret  at  waking, 
Knowing  the  shadowy  days  are  white  again, 

To  draw  our  curtains  and  watch  the  slow  dawn 
breaking 
Silver  and  grey  on  English  field  and  lane. 

Between  these  there  is  work,  reflecting  every  domi- 
nant thought  of  the  war,  by  nearly  a  hundred  writers  ; 
and  a  great  deal  of  it  remains  good  even  when  one 
contemplates  it  in  the  most  detached  way. 

142 


VALOUR  AND  VISION 

They  used  to  discuss  the  effect  of  war  on  litera- 
ture. The  question  is  insoluble  because  it  is  too 
general.  There  are  wars  and  wars.  It  is  arguable  that 
good  poetry  is  the  product  of  a  general  spiritual  and 
emotional  atmosphere,  and  that  one  war  may  pro- 
duce a  favourable  atmosphere  and  another  not  : 
that,  for  instance,  the  nation  must  be  in  grave  peril, 
not  obviously  fighting  a  smaller  and  weaker  foe, 
and  that  its  cause  must  be  universally  accepted  as  a 
just  cause.  Certainly  all  these  elements  were  present 
in  the  late  struggle  ;  had  they  not  been  it  is  possible 
that  the  feelings  which  are  dominant  here,  love  of 
life,  reverent  tenderness  for  England  and  fond 
lingering  on  every  detail  of  her  landscape,  calm  and 
proud  acceptance  of  death,  would  not  have  existed, 
or  at  any  rate  not  with  this  intensity  and  clean  cer- 
tainty. And  it  is  from  a  clean  and  strong  emotional 
response  to  beauty,  whether  it  be  moral  or  physical, 
that  good  poetry  comes.  The  revival  in  poetry  had 
begun  before  the  war  ;  there  had  been  the  beginning 
of  a  return  to  a  poetical,  which  is  to  say  a  healthy, 
outlook  ;  but  without  making  any  rash  statements 
about  wars  in  general  (many  of  which  have  been 
disastrous  to  the  spirit  and  some  of  which  have  had 
no  demonstrable  effect  upon  literature)  it  is  indis- 
putable that  this  war  of  England's — a  perfectly  just 
war  against  great  strength,  a  war  in  its  immediate 
motives  chivalrous,  a  war  which  brought  all  the 
best  of  the  country's  youth  wilUngly  face  to  face 
with  death — directly  produced  much  beautiful  and 
exalted  feeling. 

Many  things  are  described  by  these  poets  :  war 
by  land,  air,  and  sea.   Amongst  the  more  descriptive 

143 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

poems  are  some  not  generally  known.  I  had  not 
myself  seen  Mr.  Jeffery  Day's  extraordinarily  vivid, 
cunning,  and  buoyant  "  On  the  Wings  of  the  Morn- 
ing," an  account  of  a  flight  which  takes  one  right 
through  it.  We  have  here  the  workings  of  conscience, 
struggles  against  the  apathy  and  materialism  that 
threatened  us  in  1917  and  191 8,  protests  against  the 
beastliness  and  cruelty  of  war  and  the  moral  dangers 
that  threaten  nations  engaged,  revulsions  against 
the  killing  of  ignorant  enemies. 

Oh  touch  thy  children's  hearts,  that  they  may 

know 
Hate  their  most  hateful,  pride  their  deadUest 

foe, 

wrote  Robert  Palmer,  just  before  he  died  in  Meso- 
potamia, and  Mr.  Paul  Bewsher,  setting  off  on  a 
bombing  ride  : 

Death,  Grief  and  Pain 

Are  what  I  give. 
O  that  the  slain 

Might  live — might  live  ! 
I  know  them  not  for  I  have  bHndly  killed. 
And  nameless  hearts  with  nameless  sorrow  filled. 

But  more  than  anything  else  it  was  the  beauty  of 
life  and  nature,  and  above  all  the  beauty  of  England, 
lost,  perhaps  irrecoverable,  that  the  personal  and 
the  national  peril  most  deeply  drove  into  the  hearts 
of  the  soldiers  who  fought  and  sang,  and  of  many 
of  those  who  brooded  at  home. 

144 


VALOUR  AND  VISION 

Marching  on  Tanga,  marching  the  parched  plain 
Of  wavering  spear-grass  past  Pangani  river, 
England  came  to  me — me  who  had  always  ta'en 
But  never  given  before  .  .  . 

Hungry  for  Spring  I  bent  my  head, 

The  perfume  fanned  my  face, 
And  all  my  soul  was  dancing 

In  that  little  lovely  place, 
Dancing  with  a  measured  step  from 

wrecked  and  shattered  towns 
Away  .  .  .  upon  the  Downs  .  .  . 

O  Iwonzen  pines,  evening  of  gold  and  blue. 
Steep  mellow  slope,  brimmed  tAvilit  pools  below. 
Hushed  trees,  still  vale,  dissolving  in  the  dew, 
Farewell  !  Farewell  !  There  is  no  more  to  do. 
We  have  been  happy.    Happy  now  I  go. 

A  dust  which  England  bore,  shaped,  made 
aware. 
Gave,  once,  her  flowers  to  love,  her  ways  to 
roam, 
A  body  of  England's,  breathing  English  air. 
Washed  by  the  rivers,  blest  by  suns  of  home. 

These  extracts  could  be  paralleled  a  hundred  times  ; 
and  less  locally,  the  emotion  inspired  by  the  new 
beauty  of  things  that  might  be  snatched  away 
blazes  hot  in  what  is  possibly  the  finest  of  all  the 
poems  of  the  war,  Julian  Grenfell's  "  Into  Battle," 
where  the  soldier,  his  courage  confident,  his  peace 
made  with  Death  and  the  Universal  Will,  rejoices 
in  the  grass,  the  horses,  the  stars,  and  the  birds  : 

145  L 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

The  blackbird  sings  to  him,  "  Brother,  brother, 
If  this  be  the  last  song  you  shall  sing, 
Sing  well,  for  you  may  not  sing  another  ; 
Brother,  sing." 

If  a  man  feels  like  that  he  writes  poetry. 

With  the  exclusion  of  a  few  poems  and  the  sub- 
stitution of  a  few  others  Miss  Trotter's  book  would 
be  as  good  as  a  book  of  the  kind  could  be.  Only  one 
of  Rupert  Brooke's  sonnets  appears  ;  the  whole  five 
should  be  here.  The  Poet  Laureate's  verses  on  Tra- 
falgar Square  are  a  serious  omission.  Flecker's  ring- 
ing "  Burial  in  England  "  should  have  accompanied 
his  "  The  Dying  Patriot,"  which  is  relevant  to  the 
war  but  was  written  before  it,  and  Mr.  Freeman's 
"  The  Stars  "  should  as  certainly  have  gone  in  even 
at  the  cost  of  leaving  out  one  of  the  three  poems  by 
him  which  have  been  chosen.  Mr.  Brett- Young's 
*'  Bete  Humaine  "  beautifully  expressed  some- 
thing not  expressed  elsewhere  ;  there  is  a  sonnet 
by  Edward  Thomas  which  is  lacking,  so  is  Mr. 
G.  K.  Chesterton's  "  The  Wife  of  Flanders,"  and  so 
are  those  majestic  lines  which  "  A.  E."  contributed 
to  The  Times.  The  sombre  poems  by  the  late  Wilfred 
Owen  were,  I  suppose,  published  too  late  to  be  taken 
in,  but  two  poets  from  whom  something  should 
certainly  have  been  drawn  are  the  late  E.  A.  Mackin- 
tosh and  Mr.  Ivor  Gurney,  who  in  "  The  Poet  Before 
Battle  "  spoke  nobly  and  naturally  for  all  his  craft. 


146 


REAL  PEOPLE  IN  BOOKS 

THE  other  day  I  met  an  acquaintance  who 
looked  unusually  depressed.  Depressed  is 
perhaps  scarcely  the  word  :  in  his  air  was  a 
mixture  of  resignation,  sadness,  and  reproach,  re- 
proach born  rather  of  sorrow  than  of  anger.  "  Well," 
said  his  expression,  "  I  didn't  think  you'd  do  it, 
and  possibly  you  didn't  know  you  would  hurt  me. 
But  it  was  a  careless  blow,  and  though  I  have  far 
more  courage  and  stoicism  than  you  think,  I  shall 
not  easily  recover  from  it."  If  his  expression  did  not 
say  all  that  it  should  have  said  it.  It  was  not,  I  was 
happy  to  feel,  addressed  to  me  ;  from  me  he  sought 
rather  consolation,  those  sweet  lies  which  have  been 
balm  to  many  a  wound.  He  had  been  badly  hurt. 

An  old  friend,  a  practising  novelist,  had  put  him 
into  a  novel.  He  was  not  the  villain  of  the  novel  ;  far 
from  it,  he  was,  if  anything,  one  of  the  heroes  ;  he 
appeared  very  little  and  did  several  kind  deeds.  He 
was  described  as  handsome,  honourable,  rich,  moral ; 
and  a  hundred  attributes  were  bestowed  on  him, 
the  imputation  of  which  could  be  resented  by  no 
sensible  man.  But  the  portrait  was  a  recognisable 
one,  and  among  the  most  accurate  things  about  it 
were  the  indications  of  vices,  or  of  weaknesses 
scarcely  worthy  of  that  name  :  let  us  say  dislike  of 
mental  discomfort,  unpunctuality,  a  slight  defect 
of  will.  It  was  impossible  to  deny  that  the  portrait, 
where  it  was  not  just,  was  flattering.  Yet  it  was  re- 
sented, as  I  think  a  truly  faithful  portrait  by  a  friend 
would  be  resented  by  any  man.  It  was  resented  as 

HI 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

not  merely  unkind  (for  one's  friends  should  spare 
one)  but  unfair.  And  the  notion  of  unfairness  was 
easily  traceable  by  an  examination  of  my  own  breast. 
It  was  unfair,  the  victim  felt,  to  depict  any  fault  as 
a  friend's  fixed  characteristic.  For  what  are  our 
faults  ?  Not,  to  ourselves,  permanent  elements  in 
us  ;  at  least  not  things  necessarily  permanent.  They 
are  rather  smudges  on  a  pane,  cobwebs  in  a  corner, 
which  we  could  (and  which  we  may)  remove  to- 
morrow if  we  liked.  We  may  not  think  it  worth 
while — for  the  moment — to  pull  ourselves  together  ; 
but  all  the  pride  of  our  unique  personality  rises  in 
anger  when  the  suggestion  is  made  that  the  smudge 
is  a  flaw  in  the  glass,  the  cobweb  a  part  of  the  fabric. 
It  is  cruel  to  pin  a  man  down  in  this  way  ;  he  hates 
to  feel  that  there  he  is,  with  a  description  in  print 
from  which  he  will  be  unable  to  escape,  which  will 
hang  like  a  millstone  around  his  neck  ;  the  whole 
world,  as  it  were,  conspiring  to  prevent  him  from 
changing.  The  least  our  friends  can  do  is  to  refrain 
from  telling,  and  especially  from  writing,  the  truth 
about  us. 

At  best,  to  those  who  feel  that  decent  behaviour 
is  more  important  than  any  book,  using  real  people 
as  characters  is  a  dangerous  business.  In  the  in- 
stance to  which  I  refer  I  think  no  act  was  imputed 
to  the  character  which  he  had  not  committed  ;  but 
even  that  did  not  prevent  the  wound.  We  must 
admit  that  novelists  and  playwrights  may,  always 
Vvill,  usually  must,  make  use  of  the  personalities  of 
people  whom  they  know.  Not  invariably.  If  a  man 
writes  a  play  about  Nero  he  does  not  look  around 
amongst  his  friends,  however  Neronic  many  of  them 

148 


REAL  PEOPLE  IN  BOOKS 

may  be,  to  find  a  model  for  his  principal  character  : 
he  knows  enough  about  Nero,  though  he  never  saw 
him,  to  give  his  imagination  a  starting  point.  He  has 
a  face,  and  the  main  features  of  the  type  and  the 
individual  :  he  wants  to  borrow  nothing  from  A 
the  journalist  or  B  who  lives  in  the  Albany.  But 
where  contemporary  fiction  is  concerned,  though 
there  have  been  novelists  whose  brains  generated 
purely  invented  people  as  well  as  derivative  people, 
it  is  an  immense  aid,  whatever  sort  of  person  is 
being  described,  to  bear  (at  the  start  at  all  events)  a 
particular  human  being  in  mind.  It  is  an  obli- 
gation on  the  man  who  does  this  to  disguise  his 
character  beyond  recognition  where  there  is  the  least 
possibility  of  offence  :  unless  his  whole  purpose  be 
offence. 

There  have  been  in  our  day  a  great  many  novels 
in  which  men  and  women  one  knew,  or  knew  about, 
have  appeared  with  no  attempt  at  disguise  :  some- 
times with  every  effort  to  ensure  identification. 
There  are  living  politicians,  painters,  authors,  who 
are  known  to  many  people  only  through  their  alleged 
portraits  in  books.  NovcHsts  have  contracted  so 
habitually  the  custom  of  making  things  easy  for 
themselves  and  securing  a  cheap  pungency  by 
drawing  on  their  knowledge  of  Mr.  Snook,  R.A., 
Sir  John  Pigment,  or  Lady  Jane  Dolt,  that  many 
readers,  when  they  get  a  new  novel  of  the  "  moeurs 
contemporaines  "  kind,  ask  as  they  meet  each  fresh 
character,  "  I  wonder  who  this  is  meant  for  ?  "  We 
continually  find,  within  a  week  of  a  new  novel's 
appearance,  a  rumour  running  round  London  to 
the  effect  that  So-and-So  is  in  it  to  the  fife  or  that 

149 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

So-and-So  gets  it  hot.  This  in  a  fiction  is  not  the 
game,  and  the  more  realistic  and  convincing  the 
fiction  the  worse  it  is.  A  man  is  introduced  :  his 
face,  clothes,  house,  family,  profession,  achieve- 
ments are  precisely  described  ;  his  gestures  and 
the  very  accents  of  his  voice  are  reproduced  ;  and 
he  is  carried  through  a  series  of  actions  of  which 
some  are  totally  fictitious  and  others  are  copied 
from  actions  he  is  known  to  have  performed.  This 
is  unpardonable  :  it  is  simply  teUing  Hes  about  a 
real  person,  lies  which,  if  they  sound  likely  enough, 
may  cause  not  merely  pain  but  serious  practical 
embarrassment. 

For  me  I  should,  I  freely  confess,  be  hurt  if  a 
friend,  and  annoyed  if  anybody  else,  set  me  truth- 
fully down  without  imputing  to  me  anything  false. 
I  should  be  furious  if  I  were,  in  a  recognisable  way, 
described  and  represented  as  doing  things,  obviously 
piggish  or  merely  not  to  my  taste,  which  a  stranger 
or  an  acquaintance  m_ight  pardonably  suppose  that 
I  had  done.  The  one  sort  of  work  in  which  I,  or  any 
man,  need  not  mind  being  described,  however 
accurately,  and  carried  through  actions,  however 
unlikely,  is  a  thoroughgoing  shocker.  Much  as  I 
should  loathe  appearing  "  under  a  thin  disguise  " 
as  seducing  somebody  or  indulging  in  wholesale 
backbiting  (things  not  uncommon  and  liable  to  be 
believed  of  any  man  to  whom  they  are  imputed),  I 
should  not  mind  in  the  least  if  a  novelist  painted  me 
as  vividly  as  possible,  made  identification  certain, 
even  spelt  my  name  backwards,  or  even  spelt  it 
forwards,  if  he  made  his  story  obviously  false.  He 
could  take  me  and  do  what  he  liked  with  me  :  make 

150 


REAL  PEOPLE  L\  BOOKS 

me  emulate  the  hero  of  the  "  Brides  in  Bath  "  story, 
run  a  baby  farm,  blow  up  the  Houses  of  Parliament, 
or  accumulate  a  fortune  by  burglary  or  the  abstrac- 
tion of  pennies  from  blind  men's  tins.  These  crimes 
are  not  merely  crimes  that  I  have  not  committed 
and  have  not  (I  most  earnestly  assure  you)  any  in- 
tention of  committing  ;  but  they  are  crimes  which 
nobody  w'ho  knew  of  my  existence  (and  the  others 
are  not  in  question)  would  suppose  me  to  have  com- 
mitted. Murders  and  highway  robberies  galore  may 
be  saddled  upon  my  counterfeit  presentment  :  I 
shall  not  merely  not  mind,  but  I  shall  (so  strange  is 
the  constitution  of  the  human  mind)  be  openly 
pleased.  But  the  deeds  that  I  might  conceivably 
commit  and  don't  :  from  the  suggestion  of  these 
God  save  me,  and  us  all.  It  does  not  matter  being 
the  subject  of  a  fairy-tale,  but  it  is  most  disagree- 
able to  be  the  subject  of  scandalous  gossip. 


15' 


RAILROADIANA 

I  WAS  looking  over  a  list  of  sales  to  be  held  this 
spring  in  New  York  by  the  American  Art  Associa- 
tion, the  Sotheby's  of  America.  All  the  usual 
things  are  to  come  up  :  incunabula,  illuminated 
manuscripts,  first  editions,  four  Shakespeare  folios, 
etchings  by  Whistler,  eighteenth-century  illustrated 
books.  My  eye  lingered  lovingly  on  some  of  these 
categories.  I  mused  on  these  treasures  three  thousand 
miles  over  the  horizon,  most  of  them  emigrants 
from  their  English  homes.  But  one  entry  aroused  in 
me  not  a  sentimental  hankering,  but  wonder.  A 
gentleman,  or  the  executor  of  a  gentleman,  is  dis- 
posing of  a  collection  of  what,  with  fine  courage,  the 
cataloguer  calls  "  Railroadiana."  Why  should  he 
not  ?  We  have  Shakespeariana,  Baconiana,  and 
Johnsoniana  ;  nevertheless  it  looks  odd — almost  as 
odd  as  "  aeroplaniana  "  and  "  oilenginiana  "  will 
look  fifty  years  hence. 

I  suppose  that  this  hoard  of  "  railroadiana  "  (we 
should  still  call  them  "  Railway  Items  "  or  "  Books, 
etc..  Bearing  on  the  History  of  Locomotive 
Traction  "  in  this  country)  will  probably  consist 
mainly  of  works  illustrating  the  development  of 
railways  from  George  Stephenson  onwards.  It  is 
early  as  yet,  and  the  chances  are  that  the  man  who 
made  the  collection  was  himself  a  railwayman  or 
what  is  called  a  railway  magnate,  I  don't  think  that 
railways  have  yet  got  into  the  field  of  vision  of  the 
collector  proper.  But  they  undoubtedly  will  when  they 
are  slightly  more  venerable  and  when  information 

152 


RAILROADIANA 

about  their  origins   is   more   patently  useless   and 
recondite.  To-day  it  is  the  railwayman  who  forms 
libraries  about  his  industry.  When  railways  have 
been  transformed  or,  better,  abolished,  it  will  not 
be  the  traffic  experts  who  will  know  about  nine- 
teenth-century railways.  It  will  be  the  bookworms 
— men   who  could  scarcely  drive  a  perambulator, 
much  less  an  engine  ;  just  as  if  anybody  is  collect- 
ing information  about  Alexander's   campaigns  we 
may  be  sure  it  is  not  a  soldier.  Everything,  when  it 
gets  hoary,  falls  into   the  net  of  this  one  class  of 
enthusiasts,  the  dustmen,  the  rag,  bone,  and  bottle 
men  of  human  liistory.  In  our  great-grandsons'  day 
there  will  be  bald  and  spectacled  collectors  who  will 
know  by  heart  the  names  of  the  railway  systems  of 
our  day,   and  will  spend   fortunes   upon   precious 
scraps    of  information    about   those    half- forgotten 
institutions.  And  the  queer  thing  will  be  that  they 
will  search  with  most  zeal  not  for  large  and  author- 
itative books  but  for  odds  and  ends  that  w^e  regard 
as  negHgible.  Posterity's  tastes  are  always  surprising. 
To-day  men  collect,  and  will  give  large  sums  of 
money  for,   horn-books  :    little  contraptions   from 
which  Queen  Anne's  children,  numerous  but  early 
dead,  learned  their  alphabets.  Children's  books  of 
a  later  date  form  the  substance  of  specialised  collec- 
tions ;  where  (as  with  some  of  the  early  compositions 
of  Charles  and  Mary  Lamb)  they  bear  famous  names 
they  will  fetch  their  hundreds  of  pounds,  enough 
money  to  keep  a  labourer's  family  for  a  year.  There 
are  always  collectors  who  go  off  the  beaten  tracks  of 
early  printing  and  first  editions  of  the  dramatists 
and  prefer  to  devote  themselves  to  out-of-the-way 

153 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

literature  which  will  illustrate  some  aspect  of  social 
life.  The  more  ordinary  and  common  the  literature 
was  in  its  own  time  the  more  likely,  as  a  rule,  it  is 
to  be  scarce  ;  yet  it  is  from  this  sort  of  thing  that 
we  are  likeliest  to  get  a  peep  into  the  minds  of  the 
generality  of  our  ancestors  or  a  notion  of  their  day- 
to-day  lives.  The  antiquary  of  the  future  who  wishes 
to  know  what  our  own  time  was  like  will  get  a  very 
distorted  picture  if  he  possesses  the  works  of  Mr. 
Swinburne  and  Mr.  Conrad  and  has  never  heard  of 
"  Home  Notes  "  or  Mr.  Garvice  ;  if  Sir  Edward 
Elgar's  symphonies  survive,  but  not  "  Get  Out  and 
Get  Under  "  or  "  Pack  up  Your  Troubles."  Yet 
copies  of  these  will  be  few  and  hard  to  get  at.  The 
hawkers  a  hundred  years  ago  sold  chapbooks  in  the 
streets  ;  elderly  dons  now  accumulate  collections 
of  chapbooks  with  the  utmost  pains.  The  old  ballads 
were  hawked  to  the  poor  at  a  penny  or  twopence  ; 
to-day  "  a  really  fine  collection  of  Broadsides  "  will 
make  the  dealers  of  two  continents  prick  up  their 
ears.  Almanacks  w^ere  common  enough,  being  things 
useful  to  everybody  in  the  days  of  the  Tudors.  But 
people  bought  them  to  use  them,  not  to  stack  them 
on  shelves  or  stow  them  away  in  lavender,  and  the 
Bibliographical  Society  was  performing  an  im- 
portant service  to  research  last  year  when  it  pub- 
lished a  catalogue  of  Early  Enghsh  almanacks,  many 
of  them  of  the  first  rarity.  So  it  will  be  with  the 
commonest  printed  wares  of  our  own  generation. 

Railroadiana  !  Yet  in  a  century  or  two  some  of 
these  very  railroadiana  may  be  in  wide  demand  by 
classes  of  people  who  at  present  think  railways  be- 
neath a  scholar's  or  an  artist's  notice.  Books  about 


RAILROADIANA 

mechanical  locomotion  will  be  valued  in  their  degree 
according  to  age,  scarceness,  and  intrinsic  interest. 
But  it  may  well  be  that  the  real  gems  will  not  be 
books,  properly  so  called,  but  literature  which  we 
see  but  scarcely  notice  on  every  table  and  on  every 
wall.  Men  hang  up  to-day  as  curiosities,  in  the 
dining-rooms  of  old  coaching  inns,  time-tables, 
yellow  and  quaint,  giving  the  arrivals  and  departures 
of  the  York  or  the  Exeter  Mail.  The  proprietors  of 
our  most  venerable  theatres  point  with  the  greatest 
pride  to  play-bills  of  the  eighteenth  century,  com- 
mon printed  sheets  once  thrust  (for  I  suppose  they 
did  such  things)  under  every  door,  and  now  almost 
as  rare  as  primroses  in  December.  If  our  odd  civili- 
sation continues,  as  much  will  happen  to  the  an- 
nouncements and  the  time-tables  of  1920.  I  can 
visuahse  entries  in  Sotheby's  or  Hodgson's  catalogue 
of  2120  : 

Lot  2140  :  Board  of  Trade  Regulations  for  the 
Carriage  of  Live- Stock  by  Rail  Dated  1920  and 
signed  by  H.  Jones,  Permanent  Secretary.  Brilliant 
Impression  in  perfect  order.  This  document 
throws  a  great  deal  of  light  on  nmch-vexed  ques- 
tions relating  to  social  life  under  George  V,  and 
some  of  the  detail  is  very  entertaining.  Much  of  it 
relates  to  dogs,  cats,  pigs,  etc.,  the  transport  of 
which  seems  to  have  engaged  much  of  our  an- 
cestors' attention.  To  the  precise  determination 
of  charges  they  seem  to  have  devoted  a  dialectical 
subtlety  which  would  do  credit  to  Socrates.  Only 
one  other  perfect  copy  of  this  most  curious  record 
is  known  to  exist,  and  there  is  none  in  the  British 
Museum. 

^55 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

Lot  2642  :  A  series  of  six  "  Posters  "  bearing 
on  various  aspects  of  the  war  against  the  old 
Empire  of  Germany.  No.  i — A  Soldier's  Cap, 
with  inscription  "  If  the  Cap  Fits  Wear  It  "  ; 
No.  2 — Picture  of  Britannia  fighting  the  Dragon 
of  Prussianism  ;  No.  3 — Rescue  of  British  child 
carrying  basket  of  food,  from  German  by  English- 
man ;  No.  4 — Picture  of  typical  twentieth-cen- 
tury cottage,  "  Is  not  this  worth  fighting  for  ?  " 
etc.,  etc.  The  two  first  are  not  known  to  exist 
elsewhere. 

Lot  5621  :    Election  "  Poster  "  dated  1918. 

The  picture  is  torn  across  and  its  exact  nature 
cannot  be  deduced,  but  the  text — an  appeal  to  the 
voter  to  return  the  Duke  of  Walton  (then  Mr. 
Lloyd  George) — is  intact. 

These  things  will  come  up  on  some  afternoon  of 
2120  ;  but  the  pearl  of  the  sale  will  very  likely  be  a 
set  of  "  Bradshaws  "  and  "  A.B.C.s  "  covering  a 
period  of  years.  What  a  mine  of  information  our 
posterity  will  find  those  despised  guides,  which 
we  regard  as  purely  utilitarian,  and  throw  away  as 
soon  as  we  think  them  out  of  date  !  What  numbers 
of  stations,  and  trains,  and  routes,  and  fares  they 
specify  !  Where  else  will  the  scholar,  where  else  the 
investigator  of  Social  Development  be  able  to  look 
for  information  at  once  so  accurate  and  so  compre- 
hensive concerning  an  important  department  of  our 
lives  ?  And  where  else  will  the  antiquary,  the  biblio- 
phile, the  collector  be  able  to  recover  so  much  fra- 
grant detail,  such  countless  suggestions  of  the  hves 
that  we,  a    quiet,  jaded,   picturesque,  slow-going, 

156 


RAILROADIANA 

but  robust,  simple  and  merry  race  of  people  led  in 
an  England  not  yet  urbanised,  modernised,  or  devel- 
oped in  accordance  with  the  later  conceptions  of 
applied  science  ?  Men  often  lay  up  money  or  lands 
in  order  to  insure  the  fortunes  of  their  descendants  ; 
men  have  been  known,  trusting  to  their  ability  to 
scent  a  rising  market,  to  stock  their  houses  with 
pictures  with  the  same  object  ;  it  is  reported  that 
in  America  of  recent  months  prudent  men  have 
been  doing  their  best  for  their  progeny  by  laying 
down  cellars  of  wine.  But  I  doubt  if  a  man  who  is 
willing  to  take  really  long  views  and  can  trust  his 
children  to  obey  the  terms  of  his  will,  could  do  better 
than  lay  down  in  dry,  warm  bins,  not  to  be  dis- 
turbed for  two  centuries,  a  complete  file  of  "  Brad- 
shaw's  Railway  Guide."  That  is  what  will  be  rare  ; 
that  is  what  they  will  really  appreciate  and  covet  ; 
that  is  w^hat  will  fetch  the  money.  Failing  that,  any 
non-literary  relics,  provided  these  are  sufficiently 
common  and  (at  present)  insignificant,  will  do.  An 
air-gun,  a  few  sets  of  Ludo  and  Halma,  an  opera-hat, 
a  football  cap,  a  signed  photograph  of  Sir  Henry 
Ir\'ing,  a  few  pairs  of  flannel  trousers — a  collection 
like  that,  kept  in  good  condition,  would  some  day 
be  worth  its  weight  in  gold.  These  things  would  be 
regarded  as — and  perhaps  they  really  are — the  bones 
of  history. 


157 


ON  BEING  SOMEBODY  ELSE 

I  HAD  recently  an  experience  that  I  had  not  pre- 
viously imagined  :  a  journalist  attributed  to  me 
a  pseudonymous  book  that  I  had  not  written. 
If  the  book  had  been  some  very  trashy  novel 
there  would  have  been  obvious  reason  for  annoy- 
ance. The  point  is  that  it  was  not  a  trashy  book. 
On  the  contrary,  it  was  an  unusually  good  book  of 
its  kind  ;  a  book  which  has  been  generally  praised 
as  brilliant  ;  a  book  which  I  have  praised  myself  ; 
a  book  full  of  knowledge  which  I  do  not  possess  and 
sagacious  epigrams  which  my  poor  ingenuity  could 
not  have  constructed.  Yet  I  was  very  upset,  fever- 
ishly anxious  to  get  the  canard  (which  means  a  duck) 
stopped.  It  was  not  modesty  ;  I  do  not  deceive 
myself  there.  It  was  not  a  generous  desire  not  to 
be  credited  with  powers  that  are  not  mine  or  to  filch 
(which  means  steal)  the  honour  rightly  belonging 
to  some  other  man.  Much  as  I  might  wish  to  be 
thoroughly  moral,  I  do  not  think  I  should  ever  get 
really  excited,  really  angry,  because  I  had  been 
given  credit  that  I  did  not  deserve.  Far  otherwise. 
My  immediate  thought  was  :  "  Good  Lord,  I  don't 
want  anybody  to  think  I  wrote  that  !  "  All  the  great 
merits  of  the  book  faded  away  before  my  mind's 
eye.  The  few  things  I  actually  did  dislike  about  it 
grew  to  gigantic  size,  and  swarms  of  quite  imagin- 
ary defects  came  into  existence  and  buzzed  around 
them.  I  felt  as  though  I  had  rather  anything  would 
happen  than  that  I  should  he  supposed  to  have 
written  that  book.  The  eyes  of  the  whole  population 

158 


ON  BEING  SOMEBODY  ELSE 

(in  reality  superbly  indifferent  to  the  matter  and 
ignorant  of  my  existence)  were  centred  on  me,  and 
their  lips,  to  my  anguish,  said  :  "  There  is  the 
author  of  that  mysterious  book."  I  did  not  care 
whether  I  leapt  up  in  the  estimation  of  these  millions 
on  account  of  this  supposititious  performance.  All 
I  was  aware  of  was  a  desperate  anxiety  to  rid  myself 
of  this  imputation.  I  felt  that  I  hated  that  book  worse 
than  any  book  in  the  world.  "  If  it  had  been  another 
book  !  "  I  impatiently  exclaimed  ;  and  then  I 
paused,  for  the  truth  began  (as  it  sometimes  does 
begin)  to  dawn  on  me. 

The  question  came  into  my  head  :  should  I  have 
felt  like  this  about  any  other  book  ?  I  put  it  to  myself 
concretely  in  detail.  Suppose  somebody  had  im- 
puted to  me  the  authorship  of  one  or  other  of  the 
three  or  four  novels  considered  the  best  of  our  time  ? 
I  had  no  sooner  put  the  question  than  the  repudia- 
tion surged  up  in  my  throat  accompanied  with  a 
flood  of  bitterness.  Or  such-and-such  a  fine  play  ; 
or  So-and-So's  epic  ;  or  the  collected  poems  of 
somebody  else,  which  I  have  so  often  and  so  enthusi- 
astically eulogised  ?  I  began  to  find  that  the  answer 
was  the  same  :  I  should  not  like  it.  Mr.  Jones  is  no 
doubt  a  great  novelist,  but  I  could  not  bear  to  be 
considered  guilty  of  that  vulgar  passage  on  page 
323.  Mr.  Smith's  plays  draw  me  to  the  theatre  whenr 
ever  they  are  staged,  but  I  should  be  miserable  if  the 
pubHc  supposed  me  capable  of  his  lapses  in  English. 
Mr.  Green's  English  is  undoubtedly  beautiful  ; 
but  has  it  quite  the  highest  kind  of  beauty  ?  and, 
anyhow,  would  it  not  be  intolerable  to  be  presumed 
to  hold  his  views  about  morality  ?  Book  after  book, 

159 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

all  as  highly  reputed  as  contemporary  books  could 
be,  paraded  before  my  mind,  and  instant  objection 
was  taken  to  all.  Isolated  passages  might  be  borne 
with  equanimity  or  even  boasted  with  pride  ;  but 
as  wholes,  no  !  I  am  glad  that  such  works  have  been 
written,  but  there  is  not  one  that  I  should  like  either 
my  friends  or  strangers  to  suppose  that  I  had  written 
under  an  assumed  name.  This  book  shows  a  lack  of 
humour  with  which  I  should  loathe  to  be  saddled  ; 
that  a  flippancy  which  I  enjoy  as  reader  but  surely 
could  not  have  been  guilty  of  as  writer  ;  to  be 
esteemed  the  possessor  of  Mr.  White's  great  powers 
of  ratiocination  would  not  compensate  for  the  dis- 
grace of  his  constant  misquotations  from  languages 
which  he  does  not  understand  ;  and  how  could 
one  hold  up  one's  head  if  people  really  deemed  one 
capable  of  such  heavy  obtuseness  as  Mr.  Black  was 
guilty  of  at  the  beginning  of  his  tenth  chapter,  other- 
wise very  penetrating  ?  Some  of  Mr,  Pink's  lyrics 
would  be  charming  to  own,  but  I  should  blush  with 
shame  if  it  were  I  who  were  thought  guilty  of  harp- 
ing so  frequently  on  his  one  string.  Whatever  my 
faults,  I  thought,  blushing,  I  am  not  such  an  ass  as 
to  go  on  doing  such  a  thing  as  Pink  does  time  after 
time. 

The  train  of  thought  continued.  I  wondered  if  I 
could  stomach  being  saddled  with  the  whole  works 
(for  being  identified  with  another  author  must  mean 
that)  of  any  author  from  the  birth  of  recorded  time. 
Should  I  find  that  even  Homer  would  be  too  ex- 
pensive at  the  price  of  his  occasional  nods  ?  I  tried 
them  one  after  another.  I  have  a  great  admiration 
for  Lord  Tennyson.  "  The  Revenge  "  and  others  I 

i6o 


ON  BEING  SOMEBODY  ELSE 

could  appropriate  with  pleasure,  but  not  if  I  am  to 
be  deemed  the  nincompoop  who  wrote  : 

What  does  little  birdie  say 
In  his  nest  at  break  of  day  ? 

or  the  most  pompous  passages  in  "  The  Princess." 
I  should  at  once  disclaim  identity  with  Words- 
worth, with  all  his  greatnesses,  rather  than  be  sup- 
posed capable  of  committing  "  The  Idiot  Boy  "  ; 
Keats 's  odes  might  be  well  enough,  but  what  about 
some  of  those  awful  trivialities  that  lurk  in  corners 
of  his  books  ?  I  should  write  to  the  papers  at  once  if 
anybody  credited  me  with  the  contorted  sentences 
of  the  great  Carlyle,  or  the  cynicism  of  the  great 
Byron,  or  the  humourless  stiffness  of  the  great 
Milton.  W^ould  I,  I  wondered,  even  be  able  to  bear 
it  if  I  were  supposed  the  perpetrator  of  the  gross 
remarks  of  Falstaff  or  the  bad  word-play  of  Launce- 
lot  Gobbo  ?  I  think  not. 

So  colossal — for  I  have  the  consolation  of  being 
sufficiently  scientific  not  to  think  my  characteristics 
unique — is  human  vanity  ;  or,  more  pleasantly,  so 
obstinate  is  one's  attachment  to  one's  own  person- 
ality. Just  as  we  would  be  burdened  with  no  man's 
works,  unaltered,  so  we  would  exchange  natures 
with  no  man.  I  doubt  even  if  there  is  a  man  alive 
who  w  ould  exchange  faces  with  another,  though  most 
faces  are,  on  the  face  of  them,  inferior  to  others. 
A  feature  or  two  might  be  borrowed  perhaps  : 
smaller  ears  from  one  man,  or  a  straighter  nose 
from  a  second,  or  a  whiter  nose  from  another,  or  a 
slight  accession  of  hair  from  a  third.  But  a  man 

i6i  M 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

would  not  take  another  man's  face  intact  :  he  would 
want  to  preserve  his  own,  however  modified,  his 
own  recognisable  as  the  old  one  ;  he  can  stand  fifty 
blemishes  that  are  born  with  himself  better  than  one 
which  is  proper  to  somebody  else.  And,  for  his  in- 
tellect, taste,  emotions,  information,  he  would  not 
for  anything  replace  them  with  somebody  else's. 
Other  people  may  be  better  than  he  in  parts,  but 
they  all  have  vices  which  he  lacks,  and  these  defects 
he  could  not  bear  to  contract.  In  our  own  secret 
hearts  we  each  and  all  of  us  feel,  however  poor  our 
outward  performances,  and  whatever  the  trivial 
and  eradicable  weaknesses  of  which  we  are  con- 
scious, superior  to  the  rest  of  the  world  :  or,  if  not 
superior,  at  least  "  different  "  with  a  difference  that 
is  very  precious  and  beautiful  to  us,  and  the  base  of 
all  our  pride  and  perseverance. 

How  disturbing,  distressing,  and  humiliating  it  is 
to  contemplate  the  truth  about  oneself  !  But  how 
consoling  it  is  that  the  minds  of  all  our  neighbours, 
those  refined  men  in  the  club,  those  complacent  or 
harassed  people  in  the  Strand,  contain  equally 
strange  secrets  ! 


162 


A  COMMONPLACE  BOOK 

STRICKEN  with  the  prevailing  malady  and 
too  clot-brained  to  think,  I  rummaged  leth- 
argically among  a  box  of  old  papers.  I  was 
on  the  Micawber  Trail.  The  best  conceivable  thing 
that  might  turn  up  would  be  some  forgotten  un- 
printed  essay  which  would  at  once  save  me  the  pain 
of  writing  when  not  really  equal  to  it,  and  at  the  same 
time,  perhaps,  produce  the  bogus  but  useful  im- 
pression that  this  hardened  sermonizer  had  suddenly 
recaptured  the  first  freshness,  the  spontaneity  and 
the  peach-bloom  of  youth.  The  hope  was  not  cher- 
ished seriously,  for  there  were  no  grounds  for  it  ; 
it  was  entertained  merely  because  it  was  comfort- 
able. Naturally  that  essay,  carefully  composed  and 
precisely  suited  to  the  occasion,  did  not  turn  up. 
There  is  no  such  essay  in  that  box.  There  is  no  such 
hidden  treasure  in  any  box  of  mine,  and  least  of  all 
would  this  box  contain  any.  I  did  find  two  essays  in 
it.  One  was  headed,  in  a  fair  round  hand  with  a 
fair  thick  line  drawn  under  the  title,  "  The  Char- 
acter of  01i\er  Cromw'ell,"  and  the  other,  also 
beautifully  superscribed,  had  for  its  theme  the 
question,  so  captivating  to  the  novice  who  has  just 
pushed  open  the  enchanted  gates  of  Political  Science  : 
"  Is  the  State  an  Organism  ?  "  These  titles  show 
how  old  was  that  box  and  how'  old  were  the  papers. 
"  I  remember,  I  remember  the  house  w^here  1  w-as 
born."  The  laburnum  may  still  hang  its  clusters 
there,  but  "  I'm  farther  oflF  from  heaven  than  when 
I  was  a  boy,"  and  the  width  of  the   gap  was  as 

1^3 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

apparent  to  me  as  it  was  to  the  poet  when  I  noted 
with  \N  hat  high  seriousness  I  had  once  reflected  on 
the  organic  or  inorganic  complexion  of  the  State.  As 
for  Cromwell,  my  views  seem  to  have  been  un- 
settled ;  but  one  sentence,  as  I  read  this  estimate 
of  him,  came  back  to  me  like  a  remembered  scent. 
It  was  dubiously  relevant ;  in  fact,  rather  blatantly 
dragged  in  by  the  scruff  of  the  neck.  "  Some  men 
are  born  pious,  some  achieve  piety,  and  some  have 
piety  thrust  upon  them."  The  indirect,  not  so  very 
indirect,  reference  was  to  a  current  controversy 
about  compulsory  Chapels  ;  but  the  erudite  man 
to  whom  that  sentence  was  solemnly  read  aloud  did 
not  betray  by  any  blink  or  quiver  a  consciousness 
of  the  fact.  Why  should  such  compositions  have 
been  kept,  yellowing  year  after  year,  for  nearly 
twenty  years  :  lugged,  unlooked  at,  from  city  to 
city  and  house  to  house,  while  the  Free  Trade 
election,  and  the  Veto  election,  and  the  Franco- 
British  Exhibition,  and  Signorinetta's  Derby,  and 
the  Wright  Brothers,  and  the  Ulster  conflict,  and  a 
five  years'  War  came  and  went  ?  There  lie  their  stiff", 
creased,  foolish  folios  for  all  the  world  as  though 
there  were  still  some  use  for  them,  as  though  their 
whole  period  of  usefulness  was  not  measured  by 
those  quarters  of  an  hour  in  which  they  satisfied,  or 
were  taken  as  satisfying,  a  person  in  authority.  But 
it  is  less  easy  to  destroy  old  rubbish  than  new,  and 
even  new  rubbish  struggles  hard  for  survival  ;  and 
they  went  back  into  the  box. 

There  were  papers  there  of  all  sorts,  letters,  un- 
receipted bills,  a  picture  postcard  of  a  giantess, 
programmes,   fixture  cards,  and  a  silk  rosette  on 

164 


A  COMMONPLACE  BOOK 

some  vanished  day  einbleniatic  of  heaven  knows 
what  !  But  I  came  at  the  bottom  on  one  of  those 
exercise  books  with  blue  sides,  down  which  run 
many  little  zigzag  lines  of  crescents  and  thin 
cylinders  in  white  and  red.  What  on  earth,  I  thought, 
\\  ith  something  of  the  emotions  of  an  archa^^ological 
digger  in  Egypt  or  Sicily  who  sees  a  bronze  foot 
sticking  up  through  the  new  soil,  what  on  earth  can 
this  be  ?  It  might  have  been  a  volume  of  adolescent 
verse,  escaped  the  flames  through  some  accident. 
It  might  have  contained  notes  (taken  down)  on  the 
constitution  of  Athens  or  (self-made)  on  Prescott's 
"  Conquest  of  Mexico."  I  suppose  it  ^night  have 
contained,  were  it  early  enough  in  date,  cricket 
averages  ;  I  know  it  might  have  contained,  had  it 
been  very  early  indeed,  a  translation  of  .^neid  II 
into  the  metre  of  Macaulay's  "  Armada,"  nicely 
vigorous,  perhaps,  for  the  passage  in  which  those 
horrific  serpents  ramp  over  the  waves  to  Laocoon, 
but  not  entirely  suitable  for  the  more  solemn  and 
the  more  touching  moments. 

Reluctant  to  exchange  the  liberty  of  the  conjec- 
tural for  the  shackles  of  the  real  world  I  stood  there, 
my  fingers  resting  on  the  unopened  book,  racking 
my  brain  for  memories  of  what  it  might  have  been . 
There  came  into  my  mind  the  recollection  of  a  time 
when  a  youth,  spasmodically  industrious,  made  a 
practice  of  copying  into  just  such  books  sentences 
which  had  struck  him  when  perusing  the  greatest 
works  of  the  greatest  masters.  A  queer  hotch-potch, 
remembered  indistinctly,  in  patches.  Most  of  the 
observations  of  Dr.  Johnson  were  there  transcribed  : 
which  should  count  unto  that  youth  for  righteousness. 

165 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

There  were  many  fnots  from  Gibbon.  One  of 
them,  thus  recorded  in  adolescence,  still  sticks  in 
my  mind.  It  is  perhaps  the  largest  exaggeration  in 
any  serious  history  :  "A  thousand  swords  were 
plunged  at  once  into  the  bosom  of  the  unfortunate 
Probus."  Truly,  an  imperial  death  !  Bacon  was 
scoured  for  this  repository  of  wit  and  wisdom  ;  it 
contained  enough  Montaigne,  Macaulay,  Sterne, 
and  Burton  to  supply  the  calendar  makers  with 
"  thoughts  for  the  day  "  for  another  century.  Aristotle 
was  there  in  some  force  ;  nor  were  the  poets  lack- 
ing. Was  this  volume  before  me  one  of  those,  once 
loved  and  long  lost  ?  Should  I  recover  an  old  critical 
mood  transfixed  ;  would  the  result  be  a  contemptuous 
pity  for  a  former  rawness  and  solemnity,  or  would 
the  volume  be  a  pool  in  which  I  should  contemplate 
Narcissus-like  features  familiar  if  not  without  reser- 
vation admired  }  I  was  on  the  point  of  turning  the 
pages  when  memory  made  one  of  her  sudden  sur- 
prising revelations.  The  covers  of  those  old  note- 
books stood  clear  and  vivid  before  the  inward  eye  ; 
they  had  not  been  blue,  they  had  both  been  shiny 
black,  of  a  limp  stiffness.  What  had  been  blue  ? 

Then  I  thought  I  remembered.  Yes,  that  was 
blue.  The  very  thought  of  it  brought  to  my  wasted 
cheeks  a  blush  of  shame  and  guilt.  If  was  a  diary.  It 
did  not  get  very  far,  but  what  there  was  of  it  must 
have  been  very  abominable.  It  was  not  a  healthy 
diary  saying  that  I  had  been  for  a  walk  with  Jones, 
been  given  a  hundred  lines,  or  observed  a  hoopoe 
or  a  Smith's  warbler,  or  rejoiced  over  the  result  of 
the  Boat  Race.  Introspective  it  was,  written  under 
the  shadow  of  **  The  Sorrows  of  Werther,"  bought 

1 66 


A  COMMONPLACE  BOOK 

second-hand,  and  the  "  Diary  of  Marie  Bashkirtseff," 
strangely  encountered  and  unobtrusively  borrowed 
in  my  last  holidays.  What  pompous  reflections  on 
the  world  and  genius  it  must  have  contained  ;  what 
terrible  symptoms  of  religious  conflict,  happily 
largely  imaginary  ;  and  what  sickening  manifesta- 
tions of  the  first  conscious  stirrings  of  a  virgin  heart  : 
poses  struck  God  knows  for  \vhom,  myself  or  a  dim 
posterity.  If  this  is  that  diary,  I  thought,  one  swift 
glimpse  will  be  enough,  and  it  will  straightway  go 
into  the  flames,  the  flames  that  should  have  shrivelled 
its  unwholesome  body  years  ago.  That  at  least,  dear 
though  the  past  may  be  and  sweet  the  dreams  of 
childhood,  I  do  not  wish  to  recover.  Disgusting, 
morbid,  hypocritical  :  all  the  apt  adjectives  rose  to 
my  tongue,  all  the  more  bitterly  as  that  grim  inner 
voice  whispered,  in  its  accustomed  way,  "  Why  so 
venomous  ?  Do  you  think  you  have  really  changed  ?  " 
But  I  took  the  plunge  and  encountered  the  shock. 
The  book  was  completely  empty.  No  mark,  ex- 
cepting a  faintly  pencilled  Qd.  inside  the  front  cover, 
defaced  its  whiteness.  Not  artistic  ambition,  it  seems, 
had  prompted  its  preservation,  and  not  sentiment. 
Only  thrift. 


167 


SURNAMES 

IN  spite  of  the  paper  shortage  and  a  noticeable 
distraction  that  need  not  be  specified,  the  learned 
still  manage  to  continue  their  labours  on  certain 
elaborate  standard  works.  Amongst  these  is  Mr. 
Henry  Harrison's  "  Surnames  of  the  United  King- 
dom :  A  Concise  Etymological  Dictionary,"  which 
has  been  coming  out  in  parts  for  a  very  long  time.  A 
stranger  opening  it  at  the  dictionary  instalment 
would  have  something  of  a  shock.  For  this  first  page 
contains  consecutively  series  of  entries  like  this  : 

ECK(H)ART  I  (Cer.)  Sword-Brave  [O.H.   Ger. 
ECKERT        i  ecka,  weapon-point,  sword  -}-  hart, 

hard,  brave].     The  A.- Sax.  Ecgh{e)ard. 
EDELMANN  (Ger.)  Nobleman  [O.H. Ger.  edili, 

noble  -[-  man{7i'\. 
EDELSTEIN  (Ger.)  Precious  Stone  ;    Jewel 

[O.H. Ger.  edili,  noble -f- ^^^^«.  stone]. 
EHRLICH  (Ger.)  Honourable  [f.  O.H.Ger.  era, 

honour  -f-  the  adj.  suff.  -Itch]. 
EHRMANN  (Ger.)  Honourable  Man  ;  Worthy 

[f.  O.H.Ger.  era,  honour -{- man{n]. 
ELKAN  (Heb.)  an  apocopated  form  of  Elkanah 

(Vulgate    £'/cawa)  =  Possession    of    God,    or 

Whom  God  hath  Redeemed  [Heb.  Elqaiiah  ; 

f.  El,  God,  and  qanah,  to  possess,  redeem]. 
ENGEL  (Ger.)  i  the  first  elem..  of  various  compd. 

names  (see  following)  :    it  is  the  sing,  of  the 

national  name  (O.E.  Engle,  Angles  or  English  : 

see  England  in  Diet.). 

1 68 


SURNAMES 

[The  etym.  is  an  O.Teut.  word  for  *  meadow,' 
'  grassland,'  seen  in  O.N.  eng,  M.Dut.  engh, 
and  O.L.Ger.  and  O.H.Ger.  angar  (mod.  Ger. 
anger),  in  which  last  the  -ar  is  really  a  pi.  suff. 
corresp.  to  the  O.N.  pi.  -iar,  -jar  {engtar, 
meadows)  :   -elis,  the  dim.  suff.]. 

2  Angel  [see  Angel  in  Diet.]. 

Should  a  copy  fall  into  the  hands  of  Air.  Billing  he 
might  hastily  conclude  that  the  situation  was  even 
worse  than  he  had  realised,  and  that  the  British  race, 
with  the  exception  of  himself,  had  completely  died 
out.  Reference  to  the  index  explains  this  alarming 
sequence.  The  dictionary  proper  has  already  been 
completed,  and  the  present  instalment  is  part  of  an 
appendix  covering  the  Principal  Foreign  Names 
found  in  British  directories.  No  EngUsh  names  are 
given  except  a  few  in  a  list  of  "  amendments  and 
additions  "  at  the  end. 

The  instalment,  being  foreign,  is  not  so  interest- 
ing to  an  Englishman  as  its  predecessors.  "  Pinto," 
it  appears,  is  Portuguese  for  "  Chick,"  or  "  Chick- 
Hng  "  ;  "  Schenck  "  is  German  for  "  Wine  and  Spirit 
Retailer,"  and  the  entry  of  Schiller  runs  pathetically 
as  follows  : 

SCHILLER  (Gcr.)  Squinter  [for  Ger.  schiekr, 
squinting  person  ;  f.  schel.  M.H.Ger.  schel  (ch. 
O.H.Ger.  scclah,  awry,  squint-eyed]. 

Many  admirers  of  the  German  poet,  how- 
ever, prefer  to  connect  his  name  with  Ger. 
Schiller,  ''colour-play,'  '  iridescence.' 

169 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

We  are  not  al!  of  us,  however,  philologists.  Philology 
has  got  beyond  the  ordinary  reader.  In  Dr.  John- 
son's day  one  was  still  allowed  to  put  up  a  little 
speculation  of  one's  own  without  the  slightest  know- 
ledge of  Celtic,  M.H.Ger.,  or  O.Il.Ger.  Nares,  in 
his  "  Glossary,"  says  that  in  the  generation  before 
his  a  commentator  on  the  old  word  *'  gallimaufry  " 
(hotch-potch)  seriously  suggested  that  it  was  originally 
a  fry  made  for  the  maws  of  galley-slaves.  When 
philology  was  at  that  stage  of  development  the 
determination  of  name-origins  would  have  made  an 
agreeable  round  game.  But  we  have  got  past  this, 
and  the  experts  alone  are  able  to  express  an  opinion. 
The  ordinary  reader  will  get  entertainment  only 
out  of  the  selected  results  of  research. 

In  his  Introduction,  Mr.  Harrison  gives  a  variety 
of  amusing  detail.  It  is  nothing  new  that  Smith  is 
the  commonest  English  surname  ;  but  there  are 
some  surprises  amongst  the  next  nineteen  :  Jones, 
Williams,  Taylor,  Davies,  Brown,  Thomas,  Evans, 
Roberts,  Johnson,  Wilson,  Robinson,  Wright,  Wood, 
Thompson,  Hall,  Green,  Walker,  Hughes,  Edwards. 
The  Welsh  element  is  very  noticeable  ;  the  reason  is 
that  Wales  is  abnormally  poor  in  surnames.  Almost 
every  Welshman  derives  his  surname  from  a  Chris- 
tian name,  either  via  "Ap-"  (Ap-Hugh  =  Pugh)  or 
via  the  genitive  (Hugh's  [son]  =  Hughes).  John, 
William,  David,  Evan,  and  Robert  being  the  sur- 
names almost  exclusively  affected  by  the  Welsh,  the 
whole  country  is  covered  with  Joneses,  Williamses, 
etc.  "  In  many  a  district  Williamses,  often  not  all 
related  to  one  another,  are  ridiculously  numerous, 
and  various  expedients  have  to  be  adopted  whereby 

170 


SURNAMES 

to  distinguish  one  family  from  another."  It  has 
therefore  been  suggested  that  the  Joneses  and 
Williamses  should  adopt  new  names  which  the  State 
might  authorise.  It  would  not  be  a  bad  plan.  A 
l.lanellv  or  Neath  football  team  must  be  the  despair 
of  the  reporters  who  have  to  write  sentences  like 
"  Danny  Jones  got  the  ball  from  the  scrum,  sent  a 
long  pass  across  to  Dai  Jones,  who  in  his  turn  dis- 
posed of  the  leather  to  the  red-headed  Dai  Jones.  The 
latter  sprinted  along  the  touch-line,  passed  to  Evan 
Jones,  who  kicked  across,  followed  up  well,  his 
sprightly  namesake  reaching  the  corner  before  neatly 
tricking  Dai  Jones  (Neath),  and  at  the  last  moment 
sending  John  Jones  (forward)  in  with  a  pretty  try 
right  behind  the  posts." 

It  is  in  Wales  that  this  paucity  of  surnames  is 
most  noticeable  ;  in  England,  however,  it  is  striking 
in  many  rural  localities.  There  are  colonies  of 
Hunkins  in  Cornwall,  villages  of  Greens  in  East- 
Anglia,  and  Mr.  Harrison  records  a  bad  Lancashire 
example  from  the  district  of  Marshside,  Southport, 
where  the  names  of  Wright,  Ball,  Sutton,  and 
Rhnmer  have  to  do  hard  service.  A  supper  was  given 
to  fishermen  and  boatmen.  At  this  supper  "  no  fewer 
than  thirty-one  men  of  the  name  Wright  were 
present.  Of  these  twelve  bore  the  Christian  name 
John  ;  five  William  ;  four  Thomas  ;  four  Robert  ; 
two  Henry  ;  and  two  Richard  ;  and,  in  conse- 
quence, the  above-named  Wrights  and  others  are 
distinguished  in  the  newspaper  report  by  the  follow- 
ing nicknames  in  brackets  after  the  name  proper  : 
Tofiy,  Clogger,  Wheel,  Stem,  Pluck,  Diamond, 
Shrimp,  Hutch,  Cock,   Sweet,  Pantry,   Few,  Pen, 

171 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

Fash,  Mike,  Willox,  Strodger,  Daddy,  Smiler,  Nice, 
Jenny's,  Manty,  Fullsea,  Music,  Owd  Ned,  Margery, 
Buskin,  Orchard,  Siff,  and  Muff,"  In  Scotland, 
"  Smith  "  is  very  plentiful,  being  much  the  com- 
monest name  in  the  Lowlands.  Local  peculiarities 
are  very  noticeable.  In  Inverness  scarcely  a  Smith 
is  to  be  found  ;  but  one  person  in  thirty- three  is  a 
Fraser,  and  one  in  forty-three  a  Macdonald.  There 
is  something  to  be  said  for  clan  names,  however  in- 
convenient ;  but  there  can  be  no  sentimental  attach- 
ment to  names  which  have  originated  as  the  Welsh 
names  did,  and  much  could  be  said  in  favour  of  a 
deliberate  change  in  Wales. 

There  is  on  record  one  example  of  a  general 
deliberate  adoption  of  surnames  with  the  co-opera- 
tion of  authority.  In  the  eighteenth  century  millions 
of  Jews  in  Central  and  Eastern  Europe  were  com- 
pelled by  their  Teutonic  governors  to  take  sur- 
names. There  was  good  administrative  ground  for 
the  reform  ;  but  instead  of  being  allowed  to  choose 
their  own  names,  the  unfortunate  Jews  were  com- 
pelled to  take  names  given  them  by  busy  or  cynical 
officials.  Mr.  Harrison  tells  a  story  of  two  Jews 
coming  out  of  the  police  office  : 

One  of  them  had  wisely  released  a  little  cash 
privately  over  the  transaction,  and  had  received 
a  correspondingly  respectable  name — ^Weisheit 
(Wisdom).  The  other  had  to  be  more  or  less  con- 
tent with  Schweisshund  (Bloodhound).  "  Why 
Schweisshund  ?  "  said  the  first  ;  "  hast  thou  not 
paid  enough  ?  "  "  Gott  iind  die  Welt  !  "  returned 
the  second  Israelite.  "  I  gave  half  my  fortune  to 

172 


SURNAMES 

have  the  one  letter  '  w  '  put  in  " — which  meant, 
euphoniously  speaking,  that  an  attempt  had  been 
made,  in  the  first  place,  to  impose  on  the  un- 
fortunate individual  a  German  equivalent  of 
"  Dirty-dog." 

Other  names  recorded  by  Mr.  Harrison  as  dating 
from  this  period  of  compulsion  are  Eselshaupt  (Ass's- 
head),  Kohlkopf  (Cabbage-head,  i.e.,  Block-head), 
Kanarienvogel  (Canary-bird),  Kanalgeruch  (Canal- 
smell),  Kussemich  (Kiss-me),  Muttermilch  (Mother's 
Milk),  and  Temperaturwechsel  (Change  of  Tem- 
perature). He  does  not  record  the  worst  I  have  ever 
seen.  It  was  referred  to  in  a  recent  number  of  New 
Europe  by  a  writer  who  was  discussing  Prussian 
brutalities  in  Poland.  I  have  forgotten  what  the 
German  word  was  ;  but  the  English  for  it  is  *'  Ab- 
dominal Ulcer."  "  The  Rise  of  the  House  of  Ulcer  ! " 
I  doubt  if  any  patronymic  on  record  can  equal  that. 


173 


A  TRANSLATOR  OF  GENIUS 

DURING  the  last  few  years  those  who 
watch  the  periodical  Press  may  have  noticed 
unobtrusively  stealing  forth  batches  of  trans- 
lations from  the  Chinese  by  Mr.  Arthur  Waley.  Mr. 
Waley  is  one  of  the  most  brilliant  of  our  younger 
Orientalists.  His  original  literary  gifts  are  even  rarer 
than  his  Chinese  scholarship,  and  170  "  Chinese 
Poems  "  contains  the  first  fruits  of  his  poetic  in- 
dustry. 

There  is  very  little  knowledge  of  Chinese  Htera- 
ture  in  this  country.  There  is  a  good  deal  of  mis- 
conception as  to  its  nature.  People  think  of  the  East 
comprehensively  as  a  place  very  addicted  to  what 
Gibbon  calls  "  the  science — or,  rather,  the  language 
— of  Metaphysics."  Translators  foster  the  impres- 
sion— or,  at  least,  do  not  lay  themselves  out  to  dis- 
sipate it.  Thus,  even  a  series  which  contains  a  good 
deal  of  very  amusing  matter  (such  as  the  sayings  of 
Chuang  Tzu)  is  portentously  named  "  The  Wisdom 
of  the  East  "  series  ;  and  most  of  what  little 
translation  has  been  done  from  Chinese  is,  as  a  fact, 
concerned  with  Confucianism  and  Taoism.  People 
who  know  about  Mencius  have  never  heard  of  the 
Tippling  Scholar,  the  Drunken  Dragon,  or  the 
Seven  Sages  of  the  Bamboo  Grove.  Only,  I  think, 
Professor  Giles,  with  his  excellent  "  History  of 
Chinese  Literature  "  and  his  skilful  volume  of 
rhymed  versions  from  the  poets,  has  taken  pains  to 
show  how  little  the  Cliinese  have  been  concerned 
with  isms.  As  Mr.  Waley  says,  their  "  philosophic 

174 


A  TRANSLATOR  OF  GENIUS 

literature  knows  no  mean  between  the  traditional- 
ism of  Confucius  and  the  nihihsm  of  Chuang  Tzu. 
In  mind,  as  in  body,  the  Chinese  were  for  the  most 
part  torpid  mainlanders.  Their  thoughts  set  out  on 
no  strange  quests  and  adventures,  just  as  their  shij^s 
discovered  no  new  continents."  The  glory  of  their 
literature  is  not  their  speculative  work,  but  their 
lyric  poetry.  They  do  not  write  epics.  They  admire 
brevity,  and  if  a  poet  cannot  say  what  he  wants  in  a 
hundred — or,  better,  in  a  dozen — Hnes,  they  think 
nothing  of  him.  They  have  no  Homer,  Dante,  Milton, 
or  Shakespeare.  But  they  have  written  at  least  as 
much  great  lyric  poetry  as  any  nation  on  earth,  and 
the  volume  of  their  good  lyric  work  is  unparalleled 
in  the  West. 

The  one  thing  the  Western  reader  misses  is 
development,  conspicuous  change.  An  unusually 
static — though  a  high — civilisation  and  fixed  modes 
of  thought  have  resulted  in  the  subjects  and  even 
the  fonns  of  poetry  remaining  very  much  the  same 
as  they  were  before  the  great  T'ang  Age.  There  is 
no  scholastic  dictation  as  to  what  should  be  written 
about.  The  Chinese  poets  wrote  about  what  they 
thought  and  felt.  But  those  of  one  age  thought  and 
felt  the  same  things  as  those  of  another  :  they  lived 
the  same  Uves  in  the  same  surroundings,  with  the 
same  unaltering  religions  and  scepticisms  and  the 
same  tastes.  They  arrived  early  at  what  they  con- 
sidered the  perfect  forms,  the  perfect  arrangements 
of  tones  and  rhymes,  for  short  poems,  and  they  have 
considered  even  shght  variations  very  daring.  Mr. 
Waley  gives  translations  of  what  he  calls  the  "  Seven- 
teen Old  Poems,"  which  date  from  about  the  time 

175 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

of  Christ.  "  These  poems,"  he  says,  *'  had  an 
enormous  influence  on  all  subsequent  poetry,  and 
many  of  the  habitual  cliches  of  Chinese  verse  are 
taken  from  them."  I  quote  one  (the  translation,  like 
all  the  others,  should  be  read  aloud)  : 

Green,  green, 

The  grass  by  the  river-bank. 

Thick,  thick, 

The  willow-trees  in  the  garden. 

Sad,  sad, 

The  lady  in  the  tower. 

White,  white, 

Sitting  at  the  casement  window. 

Fair,  fair, 

Her  red-powdered  face. 

Small,  small. 

She  puts  out  her  pale  hand. 

Once  she  was  a  dancing-house  girl. 

Now  she  is  a  wandering  man's  wife. 

The  wandering  man  went,  but  did  not  return; 

It  is  hard  alone  to  keep  an  empty  bed. 

To  the  reader  of  translations  this  might  be  of  any 
period  ;  subject,  details,  words,  turn  up  again  and 
again  for  centuries.  But,  in  spite  of  all  their  spiritual 
and  technical  limitations,  the  Chinese  poets  achieve 
a  prodigious  amount  of  variety,  all  the  more  wonder- 
ful because  of  the  narrow  field  in  which  they  work. 
When  a  good  poet  is  moved  to  write  of  the  thousand- 
times-written-about  subject  of  home-sickness  or 
the  deserted  maiden  it  is  a  new  thing  that  he  makes, 
a  new  beauty  of  an  old  kind. 

176 


A  TRANSLATOR  OF  GENIUS 

Mr.  Waley's  translations  cover  a  large  field  ;  he 
gives  specimens  of  poets  living  as  far  apart  as  the 
fourth  century  B.C.  and  the  seventeenth  of  our  era. 
He  ignores  Li  Po,  who  in  the  West  and  in  modern 
China  has  been  regarded  as  the  greatest  of  all,  and 
takes  for  his  central  figure  Po-Chu'i,  who,  he  thinks, 
is  inadequately  appreciated.  Po  (ninth  century) 
was,  like  many  great  Chinese  writers,  a  provincial 
governor.  Instead  of  copying  out  his  biography,  I 
may  usefully  busy  myself  with  giving  a  few  of  his 
poems.  The  first  is  a  poem  rejoicing  at  the  arrival 
of  a  bosom  friend  : 

When  the  yellow  bird's  note  was  almost  stopped  ; 
And  half- formed  the  green  plum's  fruit  ; 
Sitting  and  grieving  that  spring  things  were  over, 
I  rose  and  entered  the  Eastern  garden's  gate. 
I  carried  my  cup,  and  was  dully  drinking  alone  : 
Suddenly  I  heard  a  knocking  sound  at  the  door. 
Dwelhng  secluded,  I  was  glad  that  some  one  had 

come  ; 
How  much  the  more,  when  I  saw  it  was  Ch'en 

Hsuing  ! 
At  ease  and  leisure, — all  day  we  talked  ; 
Crowding   and   jostUng, — the    feelings    of  many 

years. 
How  great  a  thing  is  a  single  cup  of  wine  ! 
For  it  makes  us  tell  the  story  of  our  whole  lives. 

The  next  is  satirical  : 

Sent  as  a  present  from  Annam — - 
A  red  cockatoo. 

Coloured  like  the  peach-blossom. 
Speaking  with  the  speech  of  men. 

177  N 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

And  they  did  to  it  what  is  always  done 
To  the  learned  and  eloquent. 
They  took  a  cage  with  stout  bars, 
And  shut  it  up  inside. 

The  next  is  a  lament  for  his  little  daughter,  Golden 
Bells,  who  died  : 

Ruined  and  ill — a  man  of  two  score  ; 

Pretty  and  guileless, — a  girl  of  three. 

Not  a  boy, — but,  still,  better  than  nothing  : 

To  soothe  one's  feeling, — from  time  to  time  a  kiss  1 

There  came  a  day, — they  suddenly  took  her  from 

me  ; 
Her  soul's  shadow  w^andered  I  know  not  where. 
And  when  I  remember  how  just  at  the  time  she 

died 
She  lisped  strange  sounds,  beginning  to  learn  to 

talk, 
Then  I  know  that  the  ties  of  flesh  and  blood 
Only  bind  us  to  a  load  of  grief  and  sorrow. 
At  last,  by  thinking  of  the  time  before  she  was  born, 
By  thought  and  reason  I  drove  the  pain  away. 
Since  my  heart  forgot  her,  many  days  have  passed, 
And  three  times  winter  has  changed  to  spring. 
This  morning,  for  a  little,  the  old  grief  came  back. 
Because,  in  the  road,  I  met  her  foster-nurse. 

Some  of  his  longest  poems  are  his  best  ;  but  I  have 
room  here  only  for  tw^o  more  short  ones.  The  first 
is  on  "  The  Hat  given  to  the  Poet  by  Li  Chien  "  ; 
the  second  was  written  after  retirement,  and  is  called 
"  Ease  "  : 

178 


A  TRANSLATOR  OF  GENIUS 

Long  agu,  to  a  white-haired  gentleman 
You  made  the  present  of  a  black  gauze  hat. 
The  gauze  hat  still  sits  on  niy  head  ; 
But  you  already  are  gone  to  the  Nether  Springs. 
The  thing  is  old,  but  still  fit  to  wear  ; 
The  man  is  gone,  and  will  never  be  seen  again. 
Out  on  the  hill  the  moon  is  shining  to-night, 
And  the  trees  on  your  tomb  are  swayed  by  the 
autumn  wind. 


Lined  coat,  warm  cap,  and  easy  felt  sUppers, 
In  the  little  tower,  at  the  low  window,  sitting  over 

the  sunken  brazier. 
Body  at  rest,  heart  at  peace  ;  no  need  to  rise  early, 
I  wonder  if  the  courtiers  at  the  Western  capital 

know  of  these  things  or  not  ? 

Mr.  Waley's  translations  appear  to  me  as  good  as 
translations  can  be.  He  was  right  in  avoiding  rhyme, 
as  there  w'as  no  hope  of  reproducing  the  intricate 
rhyme-schemes  of  the  originals  without  gross  con- 
tortions. His  wavelike  unrhymed  lines  have  a  beauty 
of  their  own,  and,  although  the  extreme  economy 
of  Chinese  writing  cannot  be  fully  reproduced,  his 
versions  are  wonderfully  terse,  exact,  and  concrete 
in  their  imagery.  His  book,  which  I  hope  will  be  the 
first  of  a  series,  will  not  only  increase  English  under- 
standing of  China,  but  is  a  gain  to  our  own  literature. 


179 


AUTHORS'  RELICS 

ALL  civilisations  have  cherished  relics.  There 
is  nothing  wrong  in  that.  The  superficially 
logical  may  put  up  a  case  against  it,  but  the 
student  of  reality  will  think  it  right  that  men  should 
thus  express  their  proper  affections  and  useful  that 
they  should  thus  minister  to  the  sense  of  tradition. 
I  think,  however,  that  the  passion  for  relics  may  be 
carried  too  far.  Some  things  are  more  significant 
than  others,  and  a  few  things  suffice.  Shakespeare's 
fine-tooth  comb  would  not  greatly  appeal  to  me 
except  as  a  specimen  of  Tudor  workmanship,  and 
when  we  come  to  the  combs  of  persons  vastly  in- 
ferior to  Shakespeare  I  feel  moved  to  protest. 

The  occasion  of  these  remarks  is  the  issue  of  a 
catalogue  of  the  Samuel  Butler  collection  preserved 
in  St.  John's  College,  Cambridge.  Butler  was  an 
eminent,  if  perverse  and  eccentric,  man.  He  was 
educated  (as  I  happen  to  have  been  myself)  at  a 
college  which  produced  Wordsworth,  Herrick,  Prior, 
Sir  Thomas  Wyat,  Greene,  Southampton,  Burghley, 
Strafford,  Falkland,  Palmerston,  and  divers  others. 
Owing  to  Mr.  Festing  Jones's  enthusiasm  the 
college  has  converted  an  old  cloak-room  into  a 
Butler  museum  ;  and  the  contents  of  this  are  now 
displayed  before  us.  The  collection  at  St.  John's  is 
certainly  extraordinarily  comprehensive.  Butler's 
"  Life  "  was  remarkable  as  being  more  detailed, 
almost,  than  any  "  Life  "  that  ever  was  written.  Mr. 
Jones  not  merely  let  one  into  the  most  intimate  and 
the  most  commonplace  records  of  the  Sage's  daily 

1 80 


AUTHORS'  RELICS 

life,  but  he  went  so  far  as  to  give  us  precise  and 
detailed  statements  of  the  contents  of  the  various 
sizes  of  portmanteaux  that  Butler  took  away  with 
him  {a)  for  a  week-end,  {h)  for  a  visit  to  Shropshire, 
and  (c)  for  a  trip  to  the  Continent.  The  clothes,  the 
hair-brushes,  the  tooth-brushes,  and  even  the  tonics 
and  digestive  pills  were  all  solemnly  catalogued  and 
enumerated.  The  collection  at  St.  John's  is  similarly 
exhaustive. 

There  is  no  Wordsworth  collection  at  St.  John's, 
though  the  famous  Pickersgill  portrait  of  the  poet 
sitting  (with  a  red  nose)  on  a  rock  and  watching  a 
pastoral  landscape,  hangs  in  the  hall,  and  under- 
graduates every  night  swig  their  beer  under  it. 
There  is  no  Herrick  collection  :  it  would  be  difficult 
to  form  one  :  when  you  have  the  first  edition  of 
the  "  Hesperides  "  you  have  pretty  well  everything 
that  is  to  be  got.  No  room  is  set  apart  for  Matthew 
Prior,  the  largest  paper  copy  of  whose  171 8  collected 
edition  is  in  itself  sufficiently  bulky  to  fill  a  small 
room.  But  Butler  had  a  faithful  disciple.  Butler  was 
preserved.  Butler  is  to  be  immortaUsed.  And  the 
relics  of  Butler  which  have  been  deposited  at  St. 
John's  beat  for  variety  and  number  any  such  accumu- 
lation of  mementoes  to  be  found  in  the  world,  even 
at  Stratford. 

We  start  with  pictures,  sketches  and  drawings  by 
or  relating  to  Samuel  Butler.  Butler  was  a  dabbler 
in  painting  as  in  every  other  art  :  his  picture  of 
"  Heatherley's  Studio  "  hangs  in  the  Tate,  and  is 
well  worthy  of  place  there  or  in  any  other  pubHc 
gallery.  He  did  a  great  number  of  pictures,  studies 
and  sketches.  When  he  died  some  were  given  to 

181 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

elementary  schools,  some  to  the  British  Museum, 
and  some  to  his  friends,  amongst  whom  ranked 
Alfred  Cathie,  his  astonishing  man-servant.  Mr. 
Jones's  and  Alfred's  have  gone  to  St.  John's,  as  also 
many  of  Butler's  snap-shots  and  his  "  camera  lucida," 
which  he  hoped  at  one  time  would  do  half  his  sketch- 
ing work  for  him.  The  paintings  at  St.  John's  are 
none  of  them  equal  to  the  fine  picture  at  the  Tate  : 
they  are  mostly  daubs  of  Italian  scenes,  many  of 
them  suitable  for  illustrations  to  Butler's  work  on 
the  *'  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  of  Piedmont."  Next  we 
come  to  books  and  music  written  by  Butler,  from 
an  article  in  the  college  magazine  for  the  Lent  term 
of  1858  to  the  1920  French  translation  of  "  Ere- 
whon,"  and  including  the  interesting  MS.  of  his 
notebooks  ;  these  are  rounded  off  thoroughly  with 
Mr.  Festing  Jones's  "  Life,"  of  which  the  college 
possesses  the  first,  second  and  third  manuscripts, 
the  proofs,  the  revises,  the  advance  copy  and  every- 
thing else.  Next  come  books  and  articles  about  Butler, 
and  then  books  which  belonged  to  Butler  :  who  had, 
as  he  said,  "  the  smallest  library  of  any  man  in 
London  who  is  by  way  of  being  literary."  Butler's 
Bible,  given  to  him  by  his  godmother,  appears  here, 
and  (delicious  thing)  the  "  Life  of  Dr.  Arnold," 
which  Butler  bought  when  he  was  writing  his  "  Life" 
of  his  grandfather  "  because  he  was  told  that  it  was 
a  model  biography  of  a  great  schoolmaster."  Descend- 
ing the  scale  we  come  to  Butler's  maps,  including 
various  reduced  ordnance  maps  of  parts  of  England  : 
that  of  the  South  Environs  of  London  is  inscribed 
"  S.  Butler,  15,  Chfford's  Tnn,  Fleet  Street,  London, 
E.G.  Please  return  to  the  above  address.  The  finder, 

182 


AUTHORS'  RELICS 

if  poor,  will  be  rewarded  ;  if  rich,  thanked."  Butler's 
Music  collection  was,  as  one  would  have  expected, 
composed  almost  entirely  of  works  by  Handel  :  the 
"  Miscellaneous  papers  "  are  more  varied.  They 
include  the  collection  of  testimonials  which  Butler 
submitted  when,  in  1886,  he  was  candidate  for  the 
Slade  Professorship  of  Fine  Art  at  Cambridge, 
various  comic  newspaper  cuttings  kept  by  Butler,  a 
collection  of  obituary  notices  of  Butler,  and  the 
"  Menu  of  Dinner  given  to  Henry  Festing  Jones  on 
the  completion  of  the  '  Memoir.'  "  Here  we  are 
distinctly  coming  down  to  details.  .And  after  going 
through  various  boxes  of  photographic  negatives 
and  a  collection  of  photographs  of  Butler's  family 
and  friends,  we  come  to  "  Effects  :  Formerly  the 
Personal  Property  of  Samuel  Butler."  Here  are 
some  of  these  effects  : 

One  mahogany  table  with  t\\o  flaps. 

Butler  used  this  table  for  his  meals,  for  his 

writing,  and  for  all  purposes  to  which  a  table 

can  be  put. 
Sandwich  case. 

This  he  took  with  him  on  his  Sunday  walks 

and  sketching  excursions. 
Passport. 

Pocket  magnifying  glass. 
Address  book. 
Homeopathic  medicine  case. 

He  always  took  this  with  him  on  his  travels. 
Two  pen  trays. 

One  tin  water-bottle  for  sketching. 
One  sloping  desk. 

183 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

One  pair  of  chamois  horns  given  to  him  by 
Dionigri  Negri  at  Varallo  Sesia. 

One  handle  and  webbing  in  which  he  carried 
his  books  to  and  from  the  British  Museum. 

One  bust  of  Handel. 

Bag  for  pennies. 

Two  small  Dutch  dolls. 

A  brass  bowl  my  brother  Edward  brought  from 
India. 

The  matchbox  which  Alfred  gave  to  Butler. 

It  is  pretty  thorough.  I  miss  Butler's  pyjamas,  which 
are  totally  unrepresented  ;  and  no  collection  of  the 
kind  can  be  deemed  quite  complete  without  some 
sample  nail-parings,  some  boots,  a  piece  of  toast 
incised  by  the  hero's  teeth,  and  some  few  studs. 
There  is  not  even  a  lock  of  Butler's  hair  here.  Never- 
theless, as  I  said,  it  is  as  varied  a  collection  of  the 
kind  as  exists.  And  it  is  strange  that  all  these  relics 
should  have  reverently  been  brought  together,  placed 
in  a  Cambridge  college,  and  dedicated  to  the  memory 
of  one  who  spent  his  whole  life  attempting  to  reason 
people  out  of  what  he  considered  their  absurd  senti- 
mentalism.  On  Butler's  own  principles  his  reUcs 
should  have  been  buried  with  him.  But  disciples  will 
be  disciples,  and  his  disciples  were  wiser  than  he. 


184 


THE  LIBRARIAN'S  HARD  LOT 

IT  is  commonly  assumed  that  the  chief  Librarian 
of  a  place  Hke  the  Bodleian  or  the  British  Museum 
has  nothing  whatever  to  do.  He  has  gone  through 
his  period  of  storm  and  stress.  He  has  catalogued  ; 
he  has  sorted  out  the  new  accessions  ;  he  has  fetched 
and  carried  for  readers  ;  but  at  last  he  has  been  (as 
men  in  so  many  spheres  are  reputed  to  be)  promoted 
beyond  the  dust  and  trampling,  into  a  region  like 
that  of  the  lotos-eaters  where  no  labour  is  demanded 
and  the  fat  fruits  of  the  salary  tree  drop  ripe  into  the 
lazily  opened  mouth.  This  prevalent  misconception 
has  at  last  stirred  Bodley's  Librarian  to  indignation. 
In  the  current  number  of  the  "  Bodleian  Quarterly 
Record  "  there  is  an  account  of  what  all  Bodley's 
servants,  from  highest  to  lowest,  have  to  do  ;  and 
the  list  of  duties  is  so  terrifying  that  I  feel,  to  use 
Sir  Andrew  Aguecheek's  terminology,  that  I  had 
as  lief  be  a  Puritan  as  a  Hbrarian. 

There  is  plenty  of  work  for  the  Chief's  assistants. 
The  Sub-Librarians  are  compiling  a  "  Summary 
Catalogue  of  Western  MSS.,"  begun  in  1890  ;  some 
of  the  manuscripts  are  still  to  be  found  described 
only  in  a  catalogue,  which  may  be  reasonably  con- 
sidered out  of  date,  printed  in  1697.  Assistants  are 
on  the  spot  at  nine  in  the  morning  (when  you,  reader, 
are  having  your  tea  and  biscuits  in  bed)  sorting  out 
the  books  and  letters,  entering  the  acquisitions  in  a 
nimierical  register,  examining  booksellers'  catalogues. 
What  time  the  Chief  Librarian  arrives  is  not  stated, 
but  he  has  so  much  to  do  that  5  a.m.  by  the  early 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

workmen's  tram  should  about  meet  the  case.  Here 
is  a  summary  of  some  of  the  complex  of  calls  that 
are  made  on  him  : 

Bodley's  Librarian  takes  charge  of  the  entire 
internal  administration  of  the  Library.  He  assigns 
duties  to  the  staff,  undertakes  the  more  important 
part  of  his  official  correspondence,  signs  all  orders 
and  acknowledgments  of  donations  and  copy- 
right accessions,  decides  on  the  purchase  of  MSS. 
and  printed  books,  deals  with  suggestions  of  readers, 
settles  questions  touching  repairs,  accommo- 
dation for  readers,  furniture,  boilers,  fuel,  lava- 
tories, and  all  such  domestic  matters.  He  is  also 
much  concerned  with  accounts,  in  which  he  is 
assisted  by  a  special  Assistant.  The  financial  con- 
dition of  the  Library  is  always  precarious  ("  annual 
income  twenty  pounds,  annual  expenditure 
twenty  pounds  ought  and  six.").  Fortunately 
things  do  occasionally  "  turn  up,"  and  for  a  time 
the  Library  rises  superior  to  its  difficulties.  The 
Librarian  confers  daily  with  the  staff  about  their 
duties,  and  he  is  readily  accessible  to  those  of  the 
Junior  Staff  who  wish  to  consult  him  about  their 
future.  His  reputation  as  an  Orientalist  brings 
inquiries  from  all  parts  of  the  world,  not  only 
about  his  own  special  languages — Hebrew, 
Samaritan,  Arabic,  and  Hittite — but  concerning 
all  the  other  Eastern  languages,  those  of  the  Turks, 
Persians,  Abyssinians,  and,  for  aught  I  know,  of 
the  peoples  who  dwell  in  Bacharia,  Moretane, 
Abchaz,  "  and  the  Isle  of  Pentexoire,  that  is  the 
land   of  Prester   John."    The   Librarian   is   also 

1 86 


THE  LIBRARIAN'S  HARD  LOT 

compiling  a  Catalogue  of  the  Collection  of  Hebrew 
books,  which  is  probahly  the  finest  in  the  world. 
For  this  undertaking  his  axiom  is,  "  Nulla  dies 
sine  linea."  At  the  moment  the  most  perplexing 
problem  with  which  he  has  to  deal  is  the  finding 
of  shelf-room  in  the  Bodleian  Building  for  acces- 
sions of  older  works  and  special  collections  such 
as  the  Backhouse  Chinese  Collection,  and  in  this 
connexion  it  must  be  remembered  that  there  are 
special  difficulties  {e.g.,  in  securing  adequate 
lighting,  strength  of  floors,  etc.)  in  adapting  an 
old  building  to  modern  needs. 

But  this  does  not  finish  it,  for  there  is  the  corre- 
spondence. 

The  correspondence  is  opened  by  the  Librarian. 
That  is  to  say  such  of  it  as  reaches  him.  It  is  con- 
ceivable that  some  of  it  never  does.  For  what  does  is 
inscribed  to  such  a  variety  of  erroneous  addresses 
that  it  cannot  but  be  supposed  that  there  are  many 
letters  which  completely  beat  even  our  ingenious 
Post  Office.  That  intelligent  department  has  duly 
delivered  to  the  Bodleian  letters  addressed  to  "  The 
Hon.  Chainnan  of  the  Greek  Library,"  "  Signor 
Library  of  College  and  University,"  "  The  Directory 
of  the  Collection  of  Holly  Bibles,"  "  The  Library, 
College,  Oxford,"  and  the  name  of  the  institution 
has  appeared  as  Blodeian,  Bodeia,  Bodderian,  Bodlei 
Ave,  Mogleyan,  Bodiliean,  Bodleland,  Bodbian, 
Bookian,  Bibliotheque  Boddeienne,  Biblioth^que 
Bodleisse,  and  Rodleian  Library,  Sheffield  Oxford. 
It  may  be  imagined  that  correspondents  who  show 
such  eccentricity  in   their   addresses   write   letters 

187 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

which  are  equally  original  and  sometimes  equally 
puzzling.  There  are,  of  course,  perfectly  sensible 
enquiries  (in  stacks)  about  books  and  MSS.  in  the 
library,  applications  to  take  photographs,  to  ex- 
change literature,  to  read  on  the  premises.  But  there 
are  others  less  straightforward.  Many  people  (who 
usually  say  they  are  "  fond  of  books  ")  write  for 
jobs  ;  many  (who  have  been  known  to  describe 
their  wares  by  giving  their  weights  in  lbs.  and  ozs.) 
wish  to  sell  old  books,  usually  worthless  ;  and  many 
ask  questions.  Here  are  some  of  the  questions  and 
demands  which  have  recently  come  to  this  hard- 
worked  gentleman  who  has  such  a  mass  of  work  to 
do,  let  alone  looking  after  the  coals  and  the  lavatories  : 

Did  Wesley  ever  meet  or  converse  with  William 
Pitt  during  the  time  that  Wesley  was  Fellow  of 
Lincoln  ? 

[To  settle  a  golfing  bet]  which  of  the  following 
is  correct,  "  If  a  match  fails  to  keep  its  place  on 
the  green  "  or  "  If  a  match  fail  to  keep  its  place 
on  the  green  "  ? 

Is  the  acacia  tree  in  my  garden  the  first  one 
planted  in  England  } 

I  beg  of  you  to  send  me  the  complete  catalogues 
of  your  libraries,  publications,  etc.  Kindly  ask 
all  the  bibliographical,  catalogue.  Directory  and 
reference  book  publishers  of  Britain  and  Europe 
to  send  me  their  complete  catalogues.  You  may 
please  circulate  this  P.C.  among  the  librarians 
and  Chancellors  of  all  the  British  Universities 
for  attention.  Please  ask  all  the  chief  librarians  of 

1 88 


THE  LIBRARIAN'S  HARD  LOT 

all  the  European  libraries  to  do  the  same  for  me. 
Kindly  name  and  ask  all  the  oriental  pubhshers 
and  oriental  institutes  of  Britain  and  Europe  to 
send  me  their  catalogues  and  journals.  An  early 
compliance. 

On  top  of  tliis  a  hundred  thousand  readers  a  year 
enter  the  Library,  and  continual  rearrangement  is 
necessary,  which  means  at  present  the  regrouping 
of  about  an  eighth  of  a  million  books  per  annum. 
"  For  the  successfid  shifting,  incorporation  and 
allocation  of  room  for  growth  of  large  sections  of 
books,"  says  the  Librarian  plaintively,  "  a  consider- 
able capacity  for  organisation  is  essential  ;  muscle 
is  also  desirable."  This  work  of  porterage,  at  least, 
the  Librarian  does  not  do  himself. 

I  shall  never  again  regard  the  Bodleian  as  a  home 
of  rest.  I  am  not  an  Oxford  man,  but  I  have  often 
passed  those  mouldering  heads  of  the  Caesars  and 
walked  into  the  ancient  quadrangle  of  the  Bodleian 
thinking  it  the  quietest  place  in  the  world.  The  green 
turf,  the  crumbhng  stone  walls,  the  little  old  door- 
w-ays,  the  ancient  lettering  :  I  have  stood  there, 
with  none  but  myself  looking,  and  ruminated  that 
here  above  all  one  had  found  a  "  haunt  of  ancient 
peace."  It  has  seemed  that  inside  (I  have  never  been 
inside)  there  could  be  nothing  but  ancient  medical 
and  theological  treatises,  huge  Bibles  chained  to 
desks,  crabbed  manuscripts  of  antique  scholarship, 
and  drowsy  spectacled  old  men  keeping  what  only 
courtesy  could  call  a  watch  over  them.  How  false 
a  vision  !  No  beehive  is  the  scene  of  more  frenzied 
industry  ;    no   council  table,  no   Stock  Exchange, 

189 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

beholds  more  frantic  rcndings  ol  hair,  more  heart- 
burnings, more  bewilderment,  more  chafing  at  the 
maddening  stupidity  of  things  and  men.  Even  at  this 
moment  Bodley's  Librarian  is  probably  sitting  there 
trying  to  answer  some  ridiculous  question  about 
Napoleon  or  miserably  writing  to  inform  some 
ilUterate  Baboo  that  he  cannot  be  made  Keeper  of 
English  Verse,  wliilst  his  brain  reels  at  the  thunder 
of  the  multitudes  of  thronging  readers  and  the  trucks 
conveying  books  from  one  unknown  destination  to 
another.  I  at  least  will  never  do  a  great  librarian  an 
injustice  again. 


190 


DISRAELI'S  WIT 

I  AM  one  of  those  who  Hke  calendars  containing 
brief  pieces  of  "  wit  and  wisdom  culled  "  from 
eminent  writers  :  though  nothing  is  more  horrible 
than  a  collection  of  such  cuUings  from  a  writer  who 
is  not  good  enough,  I  opened,  therefore,  with  some 
curiosity  "  The  Disraeli  Calendar,"  put  together 
by  Mrs.  Henry  Head,  who  has  demonstrated  her 
gifts  as  a  selector  before  this.  I  was  not  sure  that  I 
should  Uke  so  much  Disraeli  in  brief  bits  :  it  might 
be  thin.  But  my  fears  were  ungrounded,  and  the 
book  should  do  something  to  assist  that  recovery  of 
Disraeh's  reputation  as  a  writer  which  began  when 
the  first  volume  of  the  Moneypenny  biography  re- 
called attention  to  him. 

The  volume  contains  extracts  from  his  letters 
and  a  fair  number  of  passages  illustrating  his  habitual 
manner  of  thought  and  his  occasional  genuine  moods. 
There  is  a  touch  of  sincerity  about  the  romantic 
view  of  the  Tory  Party  on  the  first  page.  We  can 
hear  Disraeli  thinking  in  this  passage  from  "  Endy- 
mion  "  :  "  Great  men  should  think  of  Opportunity, 
and  not  of  Time.  Time  is  the  excuse  of  feeble  and 
puzzled  spirits.  They  make  Time  the  sleeping 
partner  of  their  lives  to  accomplish  what  ought  to 
be  achieved  by  their  own  will.  .  .  .  Power,  and 
power  alone,  should  be  your  absorbing  object,  and 
all  the  accidents  and  incidents  of  Ufe  should  only  be 
considered  with  reference  to  that  main  result."  We 
have  here  the  ambitious  Disraeli's  declaration  that 
"  the  time  will  come,"  and  the  reflective  Disraeli 

191 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

in  the  bitter  passage  on  Progress  which  ends  with 
the  Inge-like  remark  that  "  the  European  talks  of 
progress,  because,  by  an  ingenious  application  of 
some  scientific  arguments,  he  has  established  a 
society  which  has  mistaken  comfort  for  civilisation." 
We  do  not  get  here — I  don't  think  we  get  anywhere 
— anything  like  the  whole  Disraeli  :  but  we  are 
given  illustrations  of  all  those  aspects  which  he 
showed  the  world. 

But  the  compiler  of  this  Calendar,  having  as  her 
prime  object  the  production  of  an  amusing  book, 
has  not  confined  herself,  or  even  devoted  her  main 
attention,  to  extracts  which  illustrate  the  various 
sides  of  Dizzy's  character,  his  political  thought,  or 
his  power  as  a  novelist ;  half  her  quotations  are 
squibs  and  mots.  They  are  often  very  good,  always 
tersely  expressed,  and  anyone  who  examines  the 
following  specimens  will,  I  think,  easily  identify 
the  type  to  which  they  belong  : 

Lord  and  Lady  Mountjoy,  .  .  .  unfortunate 
people,  who  with  a  large  fortune,  lived  in  a  wrong 
square,  and  asked  to  their  house  everybody  who 
was  nobody. 

"  Does  your  Highness  take  snuff  ?  "  "  Thank 
you,  no  ;  I've  left  off  snuff  ever  since  I  passed  a 
winter  at  Baffin's  Bay.  You've  no  idea  how  very 
awkward  an  accidental  sneeze  is  near  the  pole." 

"  It  is  very  immoral,  and  very  unfair,"  said 
Lord  Milford,  "  that  any  man  should  marry  for 
tin  who  does  not  want  it." 

"  They  say  primroses  make  a  capital  salad," 
said  Lord  St.  Jerome. 

192 


DISRAELFS  WIT 

Time  has  brought  us  substitutes,  but  how  in- 
ferior !  Man  has  deified  corn  and  wine  !  but  not 
even  the  Chinese  or  the  Irish  have  raised  temples 
to  tea  and  potatoes. 

How  those  rooks  bore  !  I  hate  staying  with 
ancient  famihes,  you're  always  cawed  to  death. 

Her  features  were  like  those  conceptions  of 
Grecian  sculpture  which,  in  moments  of  despond- 
ency, we  sometimes  believe  to  be  ideal. 

I  hate  a  straightforward  fellow.  As  Pinto  says, 
if  every  man  were  straightforward  in  his  opinion, 
there  would  be  no  conversation. 

•  A  coquette  is  a  being  who  wishes  to  please. 
Alas  !  coquettes  are  too  rare.  'Tis  a  career  that 
requires  great  abilities,  infinite  pains,  a  gay  and 
airy  spirit.  ...  A  charming  character  at  all  times; 
in  a  country-house  an  invaluable  one. 

"  Well,  I  always  have  had  a  prejudice  against 
Pontius  Pilate,"  said  Lord  Cadurcis. 

Nothing  is  more  undignified  than  to  make  a 
speech.  .  .  .  Every  charlatan  is  an  orator,  and 
almost  every  orator  is  a  charlatan. 

I  declare  when  I  w^as  eating  that  truffle,  I  felt  a 
glow  about  my  heart  that,  if  it  were  not  indigestion, 
I  think  must  have  been  gratitude. 

What  do  these  accents  recall  ?  or,  rather,  what  did 
they  anticipate  ?  Is  there  anything  closer  in  English 
to  the  manner  of  Oscar  Wilde  ? 

It  is  not  merely  that  there  is  a  resemblance  be- 
tween the  expression  of  the  two  men,  between  the 

193  O 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

shapes  of  those  brief  and  antithetical  epigrams,  those 
sentences  with  smirking  parentheses  or  surprising 
ends.  Their  very  material  is  largely  the  same.  The 
Dizzy  calendar  is  as  full  of  puns  as  the  Oscar  Wilde 
calendar  :  each  found  his  principal  materials  in  the 
world  of  the  diner-out,  and  each  exploited  to  the 
full  the  possibilities  of  the  obvious  and  unusual 
truth,  and  of  the  obvious  and  unusual  falsehood. 
At  their  best  no  two  epigrammatists  more  closely 
resemble  each  other  ;  and  though  the  comparison 
should  not  be  pressed  too  far,  the  simiUtude  does 
not  fade  away  when  one  gets  beyond  the  mot.  In 
Disraeli  sentence  often  flows  into  sentence  in  what 
we  have  become  accustomed  to  think  the  typical 
Wildean  way.  "  I'he  world  admired  him,  and  called 
him  Charley,  from  which  it  will  be  inferred  that  he 
was  a  privileged  person,  and  w^as  applauded  for  a 
thousand  actions,  which  in  anyone  else  would  have 
met  with  decided  reprobation."  It  is  the  familiar 
manner  :  and  part  of  the  effect  of  the  sentence 
springs  from  the  fact  that,  somehow,  it  is  odd  to 
hear  a  word  like  "  Charley  "  on  the  lips  of  the 
highly-conscious  dandy  Disraeli,  a  sort  of  oddity 
of  ^vhich  Wilde  was  well  aware  and  which  he  often 
exploited.  But  one  can  quote  other  passages  in  which 
the  material  used  was  material  never  used  by  any- 
one but  Disraeli  before  Wilde,  though  W'ilde  made 
it  fashionable  in  the  'nineties.  Take  this  :  "  I  have  a 
passion  for  living  in  the  air,"  said  Herbert ;  "I 
always  envied  the  shepherds  in  '  Don  Quixote.' 
One  of  my  youthful  dreams  was  living  among 
mountains  of  rosemary,  and  drinking  only  goat's 
milk.  After  breakfast  I  will  read  you  Don  Quixote's 

194 


DISRAELVS  WIT 

description  of  the  golden  age.  I  have  often  read  it 
until  the  tears  came  into  my  eyes  "  :  it  is  simply 
one  of  Wilde's  Cyrils  or  luistaces  speaking  ;  we  can 
hardly  believe  it.  Or  take  the  mock-serious,  hyper- 
sensitive acstheticism  of  this  :  "  Mr.  Phoebus  one 
morning  opened  a  chest  in  his  cabin  and  produced 
several  velvet  bags,  one  full  of  pearls,  another  rubies, 
another  Venetian  sequins.  Napoleons  and  golden 
piastres.  '  I  like  to  look  at  them,'  said  Mr.  Phoebus, 
'  and  find  life  more  intense  when  they  are  about  my 
person.  But  bank  notes,  so  cold  and  thin,  they  give 
me  an  ague.'  " 

I  hasten  to  add  that  there  is  a  point  at  which  the 
resemblance  ceases.  Dizzy  had  great  powers  as  a 
novelist  :  such  things  as  the  descriptions  of  "  low 
life  "  in  "  Sybil  "  were  beyond  Wilde's  range,  though 
not  beyond  his  appreciation,  and  he  would  be  an 
audacious  critic  who  should  maintain  that  Wilde, 
born  under  a  luckier  star,  might  have  become  Prime 
Minister  and  an  idol  of  the  Conservative  Party. 
And,  as  the  close,  I  remember  that  he  was  antici- 
pated at  least  once  elsewhere,  in  the  works  of  the 
almost  universal  Dickens.  People  often  discuss 
whether  Mr.  Harold  Skimpole's  character  resembled 
Leigh  Hunt's  ;  they  have  not,  I  think,  noticed  that 
his  conversation  was  exceedingly  Uke  Wilde's.  Turn 
to  his  conversations,  and  especially  to  that  in  which 
he  drew  the  attention  of  the  bailiffs  to  the  beauties' 
of  Nature,  and  you  will  see  what  I  mean. 


195 


AN  EDIFYING  CLASSIC 

I  HAVE — if  I  may  be  permitted  so  personal  a 
confession,  on  account  of  its  relevance — a  num- 
ber of  small  sons.  Like  other  fathers  I  have  to 
get  them  books.  It  goes  to  the  heart  of  a  professional 
reviewer  to  buy  any  book  whatever  :  one  feels  about 
such  purchases  as  a  dramatic  critic  must  feel  when 
circumstances  compel  him  to  fork  out  ten  and  six- 
pence (plus  tax)  for  a  stall.  But  I  do  not  receive 
children's  books  from  editors,  and  their  authors, 
whom  I  do  not  commonly  know,  never  send  me 
presentation  copies  of  them.  Every  Christmas,  there- 
fore, and  on  various  natal  days  sprinkled  over  the 
year,  I  sally  out  to  explore  the  bookshops  for  all  the 
world  as  though  I  were  an  ordinary  member  of  the 
purchasing  public,  I  am  seldom  entirely  pleased 
with  the  books  I  buy.  I  will  not  say  that  my  children 
are  not,  for  their  tastes  seem  to  be  remarkably  in- 
discriminate. But  I  have  fancied  (and  how  can  it  be 
otherwise  where  children  have  such  obviously  ex- 
ceptional natural  gifts)  that  on  the  whole  the  better 
kinds  of  books  have  pleased  them  best :  that  "  The 
Jungle  Book  "  and  "  Alice  in  Wonderland  "  have 
been  a  more  permanent  delight  to  them  than 
"  Toddles  at  the  Seaside  "  and  "  Florrie's  Baa- 
Lamb."  I,  therefore,  went  out  this  Christmas  deter- 
mined not  to  buy  any  of  the  ephemeral  modern 
rubbish  which  is  written  for  children  by  half-wits 
who  succeed  in  getting  other  half-wits  to  collaborate 
with  illustrations,  but  to  add  to  the  number  of  those 
standard  works  which  never  lose  their  attraction.  I 
will,  I  said,  get  a  children's  classic. 

196 


AN  EDIFYING  CLASSIC 

What  shall  it  be,  I  wondered  ?  There  is  "  y^sop  "  : 
they  have  it.  There  are  Grimm  and  Andersen,  hut 
they    have    those.     The    expurgated     "  Gulliver's 
Travels  "  is  not  unknown  to  them  ;    they  know  all 
about  Robin  Hood,  King  Arthur,  and  Crusoe  ;  they 
at  present  dislike  the  "  Arabian  Nights,"  and  I'm 
hanged  if  I'm  going  to  give  them  "  Uncle  Tom's 
Cabin."  As   I  walked  to  the  station  my  thoughts 
travelled  back  to  a  distant,  vivid,  but  almost  unreal 
past,  in  which  I  saw  a  small  boy  curled  up  in  an 
armchair  reading.  What  was  it  he  read  with  most 
zest  ?  It  came  to  me  in  a  flash.  I  hadn't  heard  the 
book  mentioned  for  years.  It  was  "  The  Swiss  Family 
Robinson."  Why,  of  course,  that  of  all  books  was 
the  book ;  I  would  get  it.  And  I  would  read  it  again 
myself.  I  would  recover  the  old  excitement  over 
that  battle  with  the  snake  ;    I  would  refresh  my 
memory  as  to  the  habits  of  the  armadillo  and  the 
duck-billed  platypus  ;  and,  above  all,  I  should  see 
that  picture  of  the  house  in  the  tree  which  was  the 
basis  of  the  earUest  of  my  ambitions,  and  (alas  !) 
the  least  likely  to  be  fulfilled,  unlikely  though  all 
the  others  may  be.  At  the  end  of  a  day,  however,  I 
had  learned  that  it  is  one  thing  to  want  to  buy  "  The 
Swiss  Family  Robinson  "  and  another  to  get  it.  I 
went  to  shop  after  shop,  and  the  booksellers  looked 
at  me  as  though  I  were  asking  them  for  a  plesiosaurus 
or  a  mastodon.  They  had  no  copies  of  it ;  they  held 
out  little  hope  of  obtaining  a  copy.  I  tried  the  second- 
hand booksellers.  Their  tune  was  quite  difi'erent. 
They  often    had    copies,   but    these    were    always 
snapped  up  at  once.  In  the  end  I  persuaded  a  scep- 
tical bookseller  that  the  book  must  be  obtainable, 

197 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

and  that  it  was  his  duty  as  an  honourable  tradesman 
to  obtain  it  for  me  instead  of  trying  to  induce  me 
to  buy  the  latest  specimen  of  Mr.  Arthur  Rackham's 
beautiful  art.  Now,  a  fortnight  after  Christmas,  it 
has  arrived.  I  have  been  reading  it. 

There  is  no  picture  of  the  house  in  the  tree.  But 
the  rest  is  all  there  :  the  incredibly  simple  style,  the 
pious  family,  the  industry,  the  remarkable  congeries 
of  animals,  the  woodcuts,  the  harpooned  walrus, 
the  "  trusty  double-barrels,"  the  thousand  exciting 
encounters,  and  above  all  the  episode  of  the  enormous 
boa-constrictor  : 

Fritz  remained  by  me  while  I  examined  the 
object  through  my  spy-glass. 

"It  is,  as  I  feared,  an  enormous  serpent  1  " 
cried  I,  "  it  advances  directly  this  way,  and  we 
shall  be  placed  in  the  greatest  possible  danger, 
for  it  will  cross  the  bridge  to  a  certainty." 

"  May  we  not  attack  it,  father  ?  "  exclaimed  the 
brave  boy. 

"  Only  with  the  greatest  caution,"  returned  I, 
"  it  is  far  too  formidable,  and  too  tenacious  of  Hfe, 
for  us  rashly  to  attempt  its  destruction.  .  .  . 

"  Only  see,"  I  replied,  "  how  the  monster 
deals  with  his  victim  [the  donkey]  ;  closer  and 
more  tightly  he  curls  his  crushing  folds,  the  bones 
give  way,  he  is  kneading  him  into  a  shapeless 
mass.  He  will  soon  begin  to  gorge  his  prey,  and 
slowly  but  surely  it  will  disappear  down  that  dis- 
tended maw  !"...!  expected  that  the  boa, 
before  swallowing  its  prey,  would  cover  it  with 

198 


AN  EDIFYING  CLASSIC 

saliva,  to  aid  in  the  operation,  although  it  struck 
me  that  its  very  slender  forked  tongue  was  about 
the  worst  possible  implement  for  such  a  purpose. 

It  was  evident  to  us,  however,  that  this  popular 
idea  was  erroneous. 

The  act  of  lubricating  the  mass  must  have  taken 
place  during  the  process  of  swallowing  :  certainly 
nothing  was  applied  beforehand. 

This  wonderful  performance  lasted  from  seven 
in  the  morning  until  noon. 

Was  there  ever  anything  like  it  ? 

It  is  a  superb  book.  It  is  easy  to  make  fun  of 
it.  Everybody  when  he  remembers  it  remembers  it 
with  a  smile  ;  but  it  is  usually  a  smile  of  affection. 
The  style,  as  I  have  remarked,  is  the  greatest  ex- 
ample of  naive  pomposity  which  we  possess.  The 
improbabilities  (over  and  above  the  great  obvious 
improbability  of  every  kind  of  bird  and  beast  in  the 
Zoo  being  concentrated  on  a  single  island)  follow 
each  other  without  a  break,  and  no  edifying  story- 
teller on  record  ever  pumped  out  his  edification  with 
so  little  attempt  at  concealment.  Here  is  no  educa- 
tion in  parenthesis  and  no  moralising  by  implica- 
tion :  the  morals  are  expounded  in  sermons,  and 
the  facts,  mainly  zoological,  are  handed  out  in 
large  wads,  accompanied  by  frankly  informative 
illustrations.  By  all  the  rules  of  story-telling,  as 
expounded  by  critics  and  observed  by  conscious 
artists,  this  book  was  bound  to  fail  ;  the  most 
innocent  child  must  inevitably  be  bored  by  it.  But 
the  point  is  that  it  didn't  fail.  I  do  not  think  that  I 
was  more  addicted  to  sermons  than  any  other  child 

199 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

or  less  fond  of  being  educated  ;  but  I  do  clearly 
remember  that  I  was  thrilled  by  this  story,  and  that 
the  irrelevant  details  here  never  struck  me  as  irrele- 
vant. It  seemed  the  most  natural  thing  in  the  v^'orld 
for  the  author,  when  mentioning  an  ant-eater,  to 
digress  in  order  to  tell  all  about  ant-eaters  ;  and  I 
happened  to  be  interested  in  ant-eaters.  With  the 
exception  of  "  The  Pilgrim's  Progress  "  (which  is 
on  a  much  higher  literary  plane),  I  do  not  remember 
any  book  in  which  so  large  a  didactic  element  is  so 
successfully  conveyed  in  a  story.  And  the  author 
managed  it  because  he  was  a  man  of  extraordinary 
simplicity,  sweetness,  goodness,  and  curiosity,  a 
man  with  much  of  the  child  in  him,  who  went 
straight  ahead  as  he  felt  inclined,  and  never  thought 
at  all  of  himself  or  of  art.  The  author,  I  say.  But 
who  was  he  ?  This  is  a  classic  beyond  all  dispute.  On 
the  title  page  of  this  book  appear  no  names  but 
those  of  the  editor  (the  late  W.  H.  G.  Kingston) 
and  a  horde  of  ancient  and  modern  illustrators,  of 
whom  the  ancient  are  the  better.  Either  the  editor 
did  not  know  the  author's  name,  or  else  he  simply 
forgot  all  about  him,  automatically  regarding  the 
book  (but  few  of  the  greatest  books  are  looked  at  in 
this  way)  as  something  impersonal  and  established, 
like  Stonehenge  or  a  phenomenon  of  Nature.  Wasn't 
he  a  pastor  ?  Wasn't  his  name,  mustn't  it  have  been, 
Muller  or  Schmidt  ?  I  don't  know.  I  am  away  from 
home.  The  only  work  of  reference  within  my  reach 
is  Colonel  John  Buchan's  "  History  of  the  War," 
and  I  have  searched  the  index  of  that  in  vain. 


200 


CHRISTMAS  CARDS 

I  DO  not  receive  many  Christmas  cards.  This  is 
not  surprising  as  T  never  remember  to  send  any 
out.  The  most  I  have  ever  done,  when  feeUng 
most  strenuous,  was  to  scramble  out  a  few  New 
Year's  cards  to  people  who  had  sent  me  Christmas 
cards,  and  whose  remembrance  of  me  stirred  my 
gratitude.  But  I  do  always  get  some,  and  I  got  a  few 
this  year. 

I  have  just  been  looking  at  them  all  before  cremat- 
ing them.  Those  which  come  from  the  more  intel- 
lectual of  my  friends  have  no  longer  anything 
peculiarly  Christmas  cardy  about  them.  They  are  in 
good  taste,  designed  by  or  for  the  senders,  admir- 
ably printed,  and,  in  point  of  language,  ready  for 
the  scrutiny  of  the  most  fastidious  critic  of  style. 
Nothing  could  be  more  refined.  There  are  no  sprigs 
of  holly  on  these,  no  claspings  of  amputated  hands, 
no  squat  village  towers  amid  snowy  landscapes. 
They  have  brown  collotype  pictures  of  the  owners' 
houses,  choice  etchings  after  Rembrandt,  or  ex- 
quisite coloured  reproductions  of  St.  Vincent 
and  a  Donor  by  Melozzo  da  Forli  in  the  Palazzo 
Doria-Pamphili  at  Rome.  Each  card  of  them  is  a 
siknt  protest  against  the  old  kind  of  card.  As  I  look 
at  them  I  hear  them  saying,  "  What  an  improvement 
we  are  !  How  clearly  we  demonstrate  that  Christ- 
mas greetings  can  be  conveyed  without  vulgarity. 
\\  liat  careful  consideration  we  betray  !  The  men 
and  women  who  chose  us  really  wished  to  send  their 
friends  something  worth  having."  There  is  a  beautiful 

201 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

woodcut  on  yellowish  hand-made  paper,  with 
*'  A  Happy  Christmas  "  as  only  inscription.  There 
is  a  page  from  an  illmninated  manuscript.  There  is 
a  card  especially  written  out  by  an  expert  calligrapher. 
There  is  another  displaying  choice  specimens  of 
seventeenth-century  typographical  ornament.  All 
very  chaste,  and  not  one  of  them  (I  need  scarcely 
say)  bearing  a  line  of  verse,  even  of  good  verse. 

Yet  from  the  more  old-fashioned  and  less  aspiring 
remnant  of  my  acquaintance  there  still  come  a  few 
tokens  of  the  old  Victorian  sorts,  freely  powdered 
with  Robin  Redbreasts  and  mistletoe,  and  carrying 
quatrains  to  a  card.  It  was  one  of  these  quatrains 
that  checked  me  in  the  middle  of  my  campaign  of 
destruction  and  made  me  begin  these  reflections.  It 
runs  as  follows  : 

Glad  Christmas  to  you  on  this  day, 

Good  Fortune  ever  find  you. 
Life's  Sunlight  be  before  you  aye, 

Its  shadows  all  behind  you. 

Well,  you  will  say,  there  is  nothing  very  odd  about 
that  :  it  is  precisely  like  thousands  of  others.  Wait 
a  moment.  The  odd  thing  is  that  under  those  verses 
is  printed  the  name  "  Browning." 

I  stand  open  to  correction.  I  have,  I  admit,  not 
searched  Robert  Browning's  works  for  this  sequence 
of  elegant  sentiments.  But  I  really  cannot  suppose 
that  he  wrote  it.  Nor  can  I  beHeve  that  his  wife  wrote 
it.  Nor  can  I  even  believe  that  Mr.  Oscar  Browning 
wrote  it,  and  with  him  is  exhausted  the  catalogue  of 
the  Brownings  known  to  fame  or  me.  There  have 

202 


CHRISTMAS  CARDS 

been,  no  doubt,  other  Brownings.  John  Browning 
or  Nicodemus  Browning  may  have  been  the  author 
of  this  composition  ;  or  George  Bernard  Browning, 
or  J.  Pierpont  Browning,  or  some  inglorious  but  not 
altogether  mute  Ella  Wheeler  Browning.  But  if 
Robert  Browning  was  really  the  author  he  must 
certainly  have  had  a  bad  ofl'  day,  on  which  his  style 
was  indistinguishable  from  that  of  any  other  Christ- 
mas card  poet.  And  the  common  style  of  the 
Christmas  card  poets  reaches  the  lowest  known  or 
conceivable  level  of  banality  in  conception  and 
lameness  in  execution. 

I  look  through  some  of  the  other  missives  which 
have  been  sent  to  me  in  the  hope  (I  must  presume) 
of  cheering  me  up,  of  inducing  merriment  and  an 
optimistic  outlook.  Here  are  some  of  the  verses  on 
them — if  I  am  committing  breaches  of  copyright  I 
must  apologise  : 

(I) 
To  you  and  those  within  your  home 

This  Christmas  day  may  blessings  come, 

And  may  good  luck,  good  health,  good  cheer 

Be  guests  of  yours  for  all  the  year. 

As  on  Life's  tide  the  seasons  come  and  go 
May  sorrow  ebb  and  gladness  ever  flow. 

Milestones  of  olden  memories, 
Along  sweet  friendship's  way  ; 

Oh  1  how  they  brighten  up  the  past, 
And  cheer  the  coming  day. 

203 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

(4) 

Greeting  just  to  say  we  all  unite, 

In  wishing  you  and  yours  a  Christmas  bright. 

Deck  out  the  walls  with  garlands  gay, 
And  let  the  kindly  laughter  play. 
List  !  the  chimes  are  sweetly  sounding 
Xmas  happiness  abounding  : 
All  that's  good  and  true  be  thine 
At  this  merry  festive  time. 

(6) 
This  is  the  time  for  sweet  remembrance, 

For  thoughts  of  friends  both  old  and  new  ; 
The  words  will  not  express  the  wishes 

Sent  within  this  card  for  you. 

If  Browning  wrote  one  of  them  why  not  the  lot  ? 
There  is,  I  admit,  a  touch  of  Mrs.  Browning  about 
the  rhyme  of  "  time  "  and  "  thine  "  in  number  five, 
and  the  elaborate  maritime  image  in  number  two 
has  perhaps  a  touch  of  Swinburne.  But  except  for 
these  very  slight  local  differences  the  whole  of  these, 
not  to  mention  thousands  of  others,  all  that  you 
have  ever  seen  and  all  that  your  Aunt  Maria  has 
ever  seen,  might  have  come  from  one  pen.  It  is 
amazing  that  every  publisher  of  Christmas  cards 
should  have  "  on  tap  "  a  bard  so  skilful  that  he  can 
turn  out  hundreds  of  these  poems  without  ever  in- 
troducing a  touch  of  individuality  or  novelty.  For 
somebody  must  write  them,  even  if  it  be  only  the 
chairman   of  the   manufacturing   company   or   the 

204 


CHRISTMAS  CARDS 

compositor  who  does  the  type-setting.  Who  are 
these  mysterious  people  ?  Are  they  scattered  amateurs 
everywhere  ?  Or  is  it  here  that  we  find  the  explana- 
tion of  how  our  professional  and  justly  celebrated 
poets  earn  their  living  ?  Or  is  this  one  of  those  in- 
dustries which  are  the  hereditary  monopoly  of  a 
few  families  like  flint-knapping,  violin-making  and 
gold-beating  ?  Does  Mr.  Jones,  of  Putney,  whose 
neighbours  know  him  for  one  who  "  goes  up  to  the 
City  "  every  morning  on  some  vague  but  presum- 
ably respectable  business,  really  immure  himself 
for  eight  hours  per  diem  in  an  office  in  Chancery 
Lane  and  compose  those  verses  which  he  never 
mentions  at  home,  his  father  having  left  him  a  very 
valuable  connection  with  the  makers  ?  Or — this  is 
another  solution — is  it  really  that  nobody  has  written 
any  new  ones  for  years  ? 

Our  enUghtened  capitalists  are  always  said  to  be 
exploring  new  methods  of  eliminating  waste.  May 
it  not  be  that  it  long  ago  occurred  to  one  of  them 
that  a  sufficient  accumulation  of  Christmas  verses 
was  now  in  existence,  that  there  was  no  diff"erence 
between  old  ones  and  new  ones,  that  nobody  could 
even  remember  if  he  had  seen  one  of  them  before, 
and  that  it  was  criminally  extravagant  to  go  on 
employing  labour  in  the  fabrication  of  a  constant 
supply  of  new  goods  before  the  old  were  worn  out  ? 
Surely  if  these  truths  were  not  grasped  by  keen 
business  minds  in  the  old  days  of  fat  and  plenty 
they  must  have  occurred  to  somebody  during  the 
war  when  every  ounce  of  eft'ort  had  to  be  put  into 
war-work,  and  he  who  mis-employed  labour  was 
helping  the  Germans.  If  not,  are  we  to  understand 

205 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

that  the  composers  of  Christmas  verses,  after  five 
years' inactivity,  have  actually  been  set  to  work  again 
at  their  own  trade — or  (awful  thought)  that  some  of 
those  extraordinary  tribunals  exempted  them  as 
indispensable  ? 


206 


QUOTATIONS 

MOS'I'  dictionaries  of  quotations  are  large 
and  fat  volumes.  Only  gamekeepers  have 
pockets  large  enough  to  hold  them,  and 
they,  therefore,  have  the  drawback  that  they  can 
only  (unless  their  contents  be  memorised)  be  used  in 
the  Home  or  the  Office.  This  apparently  has  struck 
Mr.  Norman  MacMunn,  who  has  brought  out  a 
"  Companion  Dictionary  of  Quotations,"  which  is 
of  handy  size,  I  have  wasted — but  that  is  an  offensive 
word — a  good  deal  of  time  over  it  since  my  copy 
reached  me.  It  is  full  of  so  many  good  things.  All 
you  have  to  do  is  to  think  of  a  subject,  turn  to  its 
entry  (the  work  is  alphabetically  arranged),  and 
find  the  totally  surprising  or  the  terribly  inevitable 
things  the  greatest  of  the  world's  philosophers  and 
poets  have  said  about  it.  Who,  looking  up  "  Mad- 
ness," would  expect  to  find  the  only  quotation  these 
lines  from  Dryden's  "  The  Spanish  Friar  "  : 

There  is  a  pleasure 
In  being  mad  which  none  but  madmen  know. 

Many  of  the  entries  are  like  that,  and  where  there  is 
more  than  one  they  usually  contradict  each  other. 
Take  "  Failure."  You  gets  Keats  saying,  "  There 
is  not  a  fiercer  hell  than  the  failure  in  a  great  object," 
and  George  EUot  :  "  The  only  failure  a  man  ought 
to  fear  is  failure  in  cleaving  to  the  purpose  he  sees 
to  be  best."  The  sages  are  just  like  the  populace 
which  produces  proverbs.  You  can  justify  any 
course  of  action  with  a  proverb,  and  buttress  it  with 
advice  from  the  august.  This  dictionary  is,  as  it 

207 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

were,  a  picture  of  the  mental  confusion  of  man  faced 
with  the  many-sidedness  of  truth.  A  weak-minded 
reader  might  be  utterly  demoralised  by  it.  In  a  book 
Hke  this,  somehow,  all  voices  seem  to  speak  with 
equal  authority  and  every  proposition  seems  to  have 
the  same  weight. 

I  like  Dictionaries  of  Quotations.  I  have  a  taste 
for  wisdom  in  a  phrase,  and  any  assembly  of  extracts 
from  authors  will  hold  me.  I  have  been  known  to 
spend  half  a  morning  reading  a  calendar,  one  of 
those  fat  calendars  from  which  it  is  such  agony  to 
tear  off  March  i  or  March  2,  because  it  means 
putting  into  the  waste-paper  basket  or  the  fire  that 
sentence  of  Bacon  or  Epictetus  which  struck  one  as 
being  so  true,  so  profound,  so  precisely  what  one 
has  always  thought  oneself.  I  always  read  the 
"  Thought  of  the  Day  "  in  the  Westminster  Gazette, 
that  elevating  sentiment  from  Wordsworth  or 
Mazzini,  and  nothing  in  the  Observer  pleases  me 
more  than  that  little  cage  of  "  Sayings  of  the  Week" 
in  which  the  best  things  of  our  wits  rub  shoulders 
with  the  most  alarming  predictions  of  our  geologists 
and  eugenists.  I  have,  in  fact,  a  passion  for  scraps, 
and  I  can  read  a  Dictionary  of  Quotations  as  easily 
as  any  work  in  the  world.  But  I  do  not  regard  it  as 
a  Dictionary,  and  I  never  gull  myself  into  a  belief 
that  it  is  of  the  slightest  practical  utiHty  to  me.  And 
I  doubt  if  the  greater  part  of  any  dictionary  of 
quotations  is  useful  to,  or  used  by,  anybody.  There 
are  remarkably  few  of  us  who  ever  think  of  quoting 
anything  at  all.  Those  who  do  almost  invariably 
use  hack  quotations.  And  nobody  would  dare  to 
quote,  even  in  print,  even  in  an  anonymous  leading 

208 


QUOTATIONS 

article,  most  of  the  apt  allusions  given  by  the — I'm 
sorry — quotational  lexicographers. 

These  dictionaries  are  used  by  journalists  to  verify 
quotations  they  know  already,  quotations  the  use 
of  which  is  almost  a  matter  of  sacred  ritual  on 
certain  occasions.  Somebody  dies.  It  occurs  to  an 
obituarist  that  once  again  a  man  has  died,  upon 
whose  like,  take  him  for  all  in  all,  we  shall  not  look 
again.  He  doesn't  want  to  risk  misquotation  and  he 
starts  a  hunt,  usually  prolonged,  through  the  diction- 
aries, ultimately  running  his  quarry  down  under  a 
heading  where  it  has  been  least  expected.  Or  "  The 
child  is  father  of  the  man  "  comes  in  an  author's 
head,  and  he  can't  remember  whether  it  was  IVlark 
Twain  or  Tennyson  who  wrote  the  sentence,  or  has 
a  vague  idea  that  there  were  other  words  after  those 
which  would  also  be  worth  quoting.  A  reference  to 
Dr.  Brewer  and  Mr,  MacMurm  will  put  him 
straight.  But  don't  tell  mc  that  there  are  many  people 
who  habitually,  when  writing  articles  or  letters, 
look  up  the  "  subject  "  in  a  dictionary  and  use  what- 
ever quotation  comes  to  hand.  All  Mr.  MacMunn's 
quotations  are  interesting,  but  I  cannot  conceive 
occasions  on  which  I  shall  dare  use  any  but  a  few  of 
them.  Imagine  the  sensation  which  would  be  made 
if,  when  the  fact  of  somebody  being  away  was 
mentioned  in  conversation,  I  remembered  my  Mac- 
Munn  and  poignantly  delivered  myself  of  : 

Absence  !  is  not  the  soul  torn  by  it 

From  more  than  hght,  or  life,  or  breath  ? 

'Tis  Lethe's  gloom,  but  not  its  quiet — 
The  pain  without  the  peace  of  death. 

209  p 


ESSAYS  AT  LARGE 

And  if  I  could  not  use  it  in  conversation,  I  am  sure 
that  I  could  not  in  correspondence.  There  are  times 
and  seasons  when  I  am  sure  that  I  should  find  a  per- 
fect expression  of  my  feelings  in  another  sentence 
from  Mr.  MacMunn's  first  page,  the  sentence  from 
Sadi's  "  GuHstan  "  : 

If  the  man  of  sense  is  coarsely  treated  by  the 
vulgar,  let  it  not  excite  our  wrath  and  indignation  ; 
if  a  piece  of  worthless  stone  can  bruise  a  cup  of 
gold,  its  worth  is  not  increased,  nor  that  of  the 
gold  diminished. 

Yet  when,  I  ask,  accurate  though  it  is,  am  I  to  use 
this  observation  of  the  sagacious  Oriental  ?  In  what 
controversy  ?  At  the  foot  of  what  retort  ?  It  can't 
be  done.  And  if  I,  a  professional  litterateur,  with 
incorrigible  leanings  to  the  bookish,  the  flowery, 
the  high-falutin,  should  find  my  tongue  cleaving 
to  the  roof  of  my  mouth  when  I  had  got  as  far  as 
"  If  the  man  of  sense,"  what  would  be  the  feelings 
of  the  less  specialized  person,  though  he  might  have 
learnt  his  MacMunn  by  heart  ?  Our  optimistic 
compiler  thinks  he  may  be  of  assistance  to  school 
children,  and  "  to  the  busy  man  or  woman  who 
occasionally  may  wish  to  use  appropriate  quotations." 
But  what  would  one  think  of  a  grocer  who  should 
apologise  for  the  sugar  shortage  with  "  The  sweetest 
meats  the  soonest  cloy,"  or  a  housemaid  who  should 
demurely  shield  off  a  rebuke  with  : 

Be  to  her  faults  a  little  blind 
And  to  her  virtues  very  kind. 

210 


QUOTATIONS 

Lawyers  are  referred  to  as  amongst  those  who  are  to 
be  assisted.  It  is  true  that  Sir  E.  Marshall  Hall  and 
others  have  a  remarkable  gift  for  bringing  in  Shake- 
speare. But  even  Sir  Edward  would  scarcely  have 
described  his  client's  sufferings  in  the  words  of 
Shakespeare  that  JNIr.  MacMunn  gives  under  the 
heading  "  Tears  "  : 

The  big  round  tears 

Cours'd  one  another  down  his  innocent  nose 

In  piteous  chase. 

Who  would  dare  quote  this  .''  When  .''  Where  ? 

The  range  of  possible  quotation,  except  in  medita- 
tive essays,  is  rare.  /Vnd  perhaps  it  is  just  as  well. 
If  everybody  indulged  in  free  quotation  and  used  a 
dictionary  as  a  crutch  all  the  best  things  that  ever 
were  said  would  be  as  stale  as  "  To  be  or  not  to  be," 
and  we  should  be  utterly  cloyed  and  sickened  with 
the  names  of  the  Great  Dead.  I  have  never  met  an 
inveterate  quoter,  a  real  devotee  of  these  diction- 
aries. He  would  be  more  amusing  as  a  character  in 
fiction  than  as  a  companion  in  Ufe.  .  .  .  My  eye 
catches  another  quotation.  It  is  from  Goethe,  and 
runs  :  "  Can  it  be  maintained  that  a  man  thinks 
only  when  he  cannot  think  out  of  that  which  he  is 
thinking."  I  cannot  go  on  after  that.  I  shall  ring  for  a 
wet  towel  and  settle  down  to  it. 


211 


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